THEY DON'T CARE ABOUT KILLING ALL OF US AS LONG AS THEY CAN MAKE LOTS AND LOTS OF MONEY
Halliburton Case Is Referred to Justice Department, Senator Says
By Erik Eckholm
The New York Times
Saturday 19 November 2005
Pentagon investigators have referred allegations of abuse in how the Halliburton Company was awarded a contract for work in Iraq to the Justice Department for possible criminal investigation, a Democratic senator who has been holding unofficial hearings on contract abuses in Iraq said yesterday in Washington.
The allegations mainly involve the Army's secret, noncompetitive awarding in 2003 of a multibillion dollar contract for oil field repairs in Iraq to Halliburton, a Texas-based company. The objections were raised publicly last year by Bunnatine H. Greenhouse, then the chief contracts monitor at the Army Corps of Engineers, the government agency that handled the contract and several others in Iraq.
In a letter received and released yesterday by Senator Byron L. Dorgan, Democrat of North Dakota, the assistant Pentagon inspector general, John R. Crane, said that the criminal investigation service of the Defense Department had examined Ms. Greenhouse's allegations "and has shared its findings with the Department of Justice." Senator Dorgan is the chairman of the Democratic Policy Committee, a Congressional group that has repeatedly used unofficial hearings to question the administration's record of awarding contracts in Iraq.
The Justice Department, the letter said, "is in the process of considering whether to pursue the matter."
Ms. Greenhouse, a 20-year veteran of military procurement work, says her objections before the contract was signed were ignored. After internal clashes with officials at the agency and threats of demotion, she went public with her charges in the fall of 2004.
This year, she was demoted in August from the elite Senior Executive Service, on charges of poor performance, and given a lower-ranking job as a project manager. She has filed appeals, but for now "she has no projects to manage and she just sits in the corner," her attorney, Michael Kohn, said yesterday in a telephone interview from Washington. The inspector general's office at the Defense Department had already begun its own investigation of her charges regarding the contracting. Exactly which issues are of most interest to investigators in the Justice Department is unclear. Mr. Crane wrote that he could not provide more details "as this is an ongoing criminal investigation."
Melissa Norcross, a spokeswoman for Halliburton, said in an e-mail message, "The company continues to cooperate fully with the Justice Department's investigation of certain issues pertaining to our work in Iraq."
In letters to senior Army officials and in public testimony, Ms. Greenhouse said that in early 2003 the Corps had violated procedures when it secretly awarded a five-year, potentially $7 billion contract for oil field repairs to a Halliburton subsidiary, Kellogg Brown & Root.
Among other things, the same company had been secretly hired months earlier to draw up a plan for the job, she said. She also said that even if the urgency of war required dispensing with competitive bidding, the duration of the contract should have been shorter. She objected again in December 2003, when officials granted a waiver to Kellogg Brown & Root, approving the high prices it had paid to import fuel from Kuwait. Other Pentagon agencies said the company had paid tens of millions of dollars too much, without offering any justification for the payments.
In her e-mail message, Ms. Norcross said, "KBR will continue to work with our customers and the appropriate government agencies to demonstrate, once and for all, that KBR delivered vital services for the U.S. troops and the Iraqi people within the appropriate bounds of government contracting and at a fair and reasonable cost, given the circumstances."
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Published on Thursday, November 17, 2005 by CommonDreams.org
Dick Cheney: War Profiteer
by Tom Turnipseed
Questions persist about Vice-President Cheneys role in the ongoing investigation and scandal swirling about the White House. His chief of staff and confidante Lewis Scooter Libby has been indicted for perjury and obstruction of justice. Lets take a look at some personal incentives for Cheneys selling war to our country.
Cheney has pursued a political and corporate career to make himself very rich and powerful. He is the personification of a war profiteer who slid through the revolving door connecting the public and private sectors of the defense establishment on two occasions in a career that has served his relentless quest for power and profits.
As Defense Secretary, Mr. Cheney commissioned a study for the U.S. Department of Defense by Brown and Root Services (now Kellogg, Brown and Root), a wholly owned subsidiary of Halliburton. The study recommended that private firms like Halliburton should take over logistical support programs for U.S. military operations around the world. Just two years after he was Secretary of Defense, Cheney stepped through the revolving door linking the Department of Defense with defense contractors and became CEO of Halliburton. Halliburton was the principal beneficiary of Cheneys privatization efforts for our militarys logistical support and Cheney was paid $44 million for five year's work with them before he slipped back through the revolving door of war profiteering to become Vice-President of the United States. When asked about the money he received from Halliburton, Cheney said. "I tell you that the government had absolutely nothing to do with it."
The Bush administration has dished out lucrative reconstruction contracts in Iraq to favored U.S. based corporations including Halliburton and denied contracts to many Iraqi and foreign based companies. To the conquerors go the spoils was the message on December 11, 2003 when Bush said, The taxpayers understand why it makes sense for countries that risk lives to participate in the contracts in Iraq, It's very simple. Our people risk their lives, friendly coalition folks risk their lives, and therefore the contracting is going to reflect that.
Bushs statement is a stunning admission of how much corrupt corporations control our foreign policy. Under Cheneys leadership Halliburton out did Enron in using offshore subsidiaries as tax shelters to hide profits to bilk U.S. taxpayers. Halliburton also utilized off-shore subsidiaries to contract for services and sell banned equipment to rogue states like Iran, Iraq and Libya. This would be illegal if done directly by Halliburton.
At last count Halliburton had 58 offshore subsidiaries in Caribbean tax havens. With Cheney at the helm Halliburtons tax payments to the U.S. went from $302 million in 1998 to zero in 1999, when they also received a refund of $85 million from the Internal Revenue Service.
During Cheneys tenure as CEO from 1995 to 2000, Halliburton Products and Services set up shop in Iran. The Halliburton subsidiary does approximately $40 million a year worth of oil field service work for the Iranian government. 60 Minutes correspondent Lesley Stahl visited the subsidiary in the Cayman Islands and found that it had no office and no employees. The mailing address was a local bank with which the subsidiary is registered. Stahl was met there by the banks manager who informed her that all mail to the subsidiary is forwarded to Halliburton headquarters in Houston. Halliburton had created the subsidiary to allow itself to do illegal business with a rogue state and to skip out on its taxes in the process.
With Irans president vowing to destroy Israel and being accused by the Bush administration of harboring and aiding al-Qaeda operatives, Cheneys company is doing business with Iran through a subsidiary and dodging its tax obligations to the U.S.
Halliburton has been more closely associated with the invasion of Iraq than any other corporation. Before the Iraq War began, it was 19th on the U.S. Army's list of top contractors and zoomed to number 1 in 2003. In 2003 Halliburton made $4.2 billion from the U.S. government. Cheney stated he had , "severed all my ties with the company, gotten rid of all my financial interest."
Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) recently asserted that Cheney's stock options which were worth $241,498 a year ago, are now valued at more than $8 million-- for an increase of 3,281% . Cheney has pledged to give the proceeds to charity. Cheney continues to received a deferred salary from the company. He was paid $205,298 in 2001; $162,392 in 2002; $178,437 in 2003; and $194,852 in 2004.
The Congressional Research Service has concluded that holding stock options while in elective office does constitute a financial interest whether or not the holder of the options donates the proceeds to charities, and deferred compensation is also a financial interest.
Calling on Cheney to sever his financial ties to Halliburton, Lautenberg points out that the company has already raked in more than $10 billion for work in Iraq, and was handed some of the first Katrina contracts. The company has been criticized by auditors for its handling of no-bid contacts in Iraq, and there have been numerous allegations of over charging for services. Auditors found the firm marked up meal prices for troops and inflated gas prices in a deal with a Kuwaiti supplier. The company also built the American prison at Guantanamo Bay. Lautenberg said, "It is unseemly for the Vice President to continue to benefit from this company at the same time his Administration funnels billions of dollars to it.
Cheneys war profiteering requires redress and justice.
Tom Turnipseed is an attorney, writer and political activist in Columbia, South Carolina. www.turnipseed.net
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http://www.truthout.org/multimedia.htm
This short video shows my daughter, Carly, reading her poem "A Nation Rocked to Sleep" at Casey's memorial at Arlington West, Santa Barbara, on April 03. 2005. The memorial was also for Sgt. Mike Mitchell who was killed in the same ambush Casey was killed in. His family has become close with our family. My three children, Carly, Andy, and Janey are all featured.
It is a brilliant short piece by my good friends Peter Dudar and Sally Marr who made the movie Arlington West.
Love the proud mama,
Cindy
'Peace Mom' Sheehan to Release Book
The Associated Press
Saturday 19 November 2005
Fort Worth, Texas - After spending scorching August days with hundreds of war protesters at her makeshift camp nearPresident Bush's Crawford ranch, Cindy Sheehan slipped away each night to her tent or RV for a few quiet moments on her laptop.
The words came easily as she opined about the war, U.S. leaders, her critics, her supporters. And the tears started to flow no matter how many times she wrote about her 24-year-old soldier son Casey, who died in Iraq last year.
"I miss him more every day. It seems the void in my life grows as time goes on, and I realize I am never going to see him again or hear his voice," Sheehan wrote. "I knew he was going to be a great man. I just had no idea how great he was going to be or how much it was going to hurt me."
Now those journal entries are in her book, "Not One More Mother's Child," to be released Wednesday. The paperback also contains some of her speeches to peace groups earlier this year, letters to politicians and writings since leaving Crawford.
"I never wrote anything more than a note to excuse my kids from school before Casey was killed, so to see something I wrote in print with my name on it is amazing," Sheehan told The Associated Press by phone from her home in Berkeley, Calif.
Sheehan gained national attention during her 26-day vigil on a Texas roadside near President Bush's ranch in August. She refused to move until the president met with her or ended his vacation. That moved Arnie Kotler, the founder of a Hawaii publishing company who saw news coverage and read Sheehan's Internet blog entries from the protest.
"I thought, 'This is already a book. This is incredible,"' said Kotler of Koa Books, which printed about 20,000 copies. "We got it done as quickly as we could, and the deepest reason is to stop the war."
The White House did not return calls seeking comment on the book.
Sheehan shares details about Casey, her oldest child grew up to be an Eagle scout who considered becoming a priest. He enlisted, Sheehan said, to give something back to the country.
"He didn't enlist to be used and misused by a reckless commander in chief who sent his troops to preemptively attack and occupy a country that was no imminent threat or any threat to our country," she writes.
In a chapter called "The Peaceful Occupation of Crawford, Texas," Sheehan chronicles the daily events of the protest, such as being bombarded with media interviews, the campsite wedding of two peace activists and visits from celebrities Martin Sheen, Joan Baez and the Rev. Al Sharpton. She also writes about her critics.
"The right-wingers are really having a field day with me," she wrote. "... What really hurts me the most is when people say that I am dishonoring Casey by my protest in Crawford. By wanting our troops to come home alive and well, that I am somehow not supporting them."
Sheehan plans to go on a book tour, but first she wants to resume her protest in Crawford this week as Bush spends Thanksgiving at his ranch.
"The Camp Casey movement will not die until we have a genuine accounting of the truth and until our troops are brought home," she wrote. "Get used to it, George. We are not going away."
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