UN audit says Halliburton overcharged Iraq

UN audit says Halliburton overcharged Iraq

WASHINGTON (AFP) - A UN auditing board has recommended the United States pay as much as 208 million dollars to Iraq for overbilling or shoddy work performed by a subsidiary of the US oil services firm Halliburton, The New York Times reports.

The work, carried out by Kellogg, Brown and Root, was paid for with Iraqi oil revenues but was delivered at inflated prices or done poorly, the board said, quoted by the US newspaper.

While audits had called into question 208 million dollars worth of contracting work, it was too early to say how much of the funds should be paid back because analysis of financial statements and documents was still under way, the newspaper wrote.

Once the analysis was finished, the UN monitoring board "recommends that amounts disbursed to contractors that cannot be supported as fair be reimbursed expeditiously," the board said in a statement, quoted by the daily.

The board, which relied mainly on Pentagon audits for its findings, could only make recommendations and the ultimate decision on repayment would be up to the United States government. The Pentagon has yet to release its audits of the contracting work.

A spokeswoman for Halliburton told the newspaper questions raised by earlier US military audits had focused on documentation and not the quality of the work performed by Kellogg, Brown and Root.

"Therefore, it would be completely wrong to say or imply that any of these costs that were incurred at the client's direction for its benefit are 'overcharges,'" spokeswoman Cathy Mann was quoted as saying in an e-mail to the paper.

Halliburton, once managed by now Vice President Dick Cheney, has been accused previously of overbilling and opposition Democrats have alleged it enjoyed preferential treatment for government contracts. Cheney has rejected the allegations.

A former Iraqi academic, Louay Bahry, told the newspaper that the board's findings would confirm suspicions among ordinary Iraqis that Washington's underlying motive in going to war against Saddam Hussein's regime in 2003 was to control the country's oil wealth.

"Something like this will be caught in the Iraqi press and be discussed by the Iraqi general public and will leave a very bad taste in the mouth of the Iraqis," Bahry, who works at the Middle East Institute in Washington, told the newspaper.

Charged with overseeing Iraq's oil revenues and money seized from Saddam Hussein's regime, the monitoring board includes representatives from the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, the Arab Fund for Economic and Social Development, the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the Iraqi government.

The results of the audit should allow the Iraqi government "the right to go back to K.B.R. (Kellogg, Brown and Root) and say, 'Look, you've overbilled me on this, this is what you could repay me,'" a board member was quoted as saying by the paper.

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Cheney in the Bunker

By Daniel Klaidman and Michael Isikoff / Newsweek

Nov. 14, 2005 issue - As usual, Dick Cheney insisted on doing business behind closed doors. Last Tuesday, Senate Republicans were winding up their weekly luncheon in the Capitol when the vice president rose to speak. Staffers were quickly ordered out of the room—what Cheney had to say was for senators only. Normally taciturn, Cheney was uncharacteristically impassioned, according to two GOP senators who did not want to be on the record about a private meeting. He was very upset over the Senate's overwhelming passage of an amendment that prohibits inhumane treatment of terrorist detainees. Cheney said the law would tie the president's hands and end up costing "thousands of lives." He dramatized the point, conjuring up a scenario in which a captured Qaeda operative, another Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, refuses to give his interrogators details about an imminent attack. "We have to be able to do what is necessary," the vice president said, according to one of the senators who was present. The lawmakers listened, but they weren't moved to act. Sen. John McCain, who authored the anti-torture amendment, spoke up. "This is killing us around the world," he said. The House, which will likely vote on the measure soon, is also expected to pass it by a large margin.

These are tough times for Cheney. He has always been the administration's most "forward-leaning" force when it came to carrying out the war on terror and the Iraq invasion. Until recently Cheney's own authority was largely unchallenged in Republican Washington. But Congress, mindful of the public's turn against the war, is now openly defying his hard-line policies. Powerful figures—within the West Wing, at the State Department and Pentagon—who once deferred to him are now peeling away, worried that Cheney may have gone too far. His credibility has also been damaged by the CIA-leak investigation, which nabbed his trusted No. 2, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, who pleaded not guilty last week to charges of perjury and obstruction of justice.

The vice president could be forgiven for retreating to his undisclosed location and waiting out the worst of it. Instead, his response has been pure Cheney. He's not budging. If anything—as the Senate meeting shows—the veep has become more convinced that he's right and his opponents are wrong.

In his time of need, he has counted on the help of at least one unswervingly faithful aide. With Libby sidelined, the vice president has elevated David Addington, a loyal acolyte, to be his new chief of staff. Addington has been at the vice president's side since the 1980s, when Cheney was a congressman and Addington a lawyer for the House intelligence committee. When Cheney became secretary of Defense during the first Bush presidency, Addington went with him. A skilled bureaucratic infighter who uses his temper strategically to stun foes into submission, Addington, now 48, has matured into a classic Washington type: the most powerful man you've never heard of. As Cheney's counsel, Addington—a private workaholic who, unlike Libby, shuns reporters—was one of the most forceful voices for tough treatment of terror suspects. It was Addington who drafted the January 2002 Alberto Gonzales memo which argued that captured Taliban and Qaeda fighters shouldn't be covered by the Geneva Conventions. He was behind the presidential order establishing military tribunals. And he passionately argued that in wartime the president has almost unlimited power—a point of view that was spelled out in the "torture memo" that the administration was eventually forced to rescind under public pressure.

Now those policies have become a burden for the White House. When Bush began his second term in 2004, a group of top administration officials, led by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, began a quiet campaign to back off some controversial detention and interrogation methods that were damaging U.S. credibility around the world. At White House meetings, Rice openly worried that in the aftermath of Abu Ghraib "these policies threatened to be the president's legacy," says an administration official who was present but asked for anonymity about the private sessions. Among the proposals seriously considered inside the bureaucracy: shutting down the prison at Guan-tanamo Bay, allowing U.N. inspectors to tour Gitmo and pledging to follow Article III of the Geneva Conventions, which bars "cruel, degrading and inhumane" treatment of prisoners. Among Rice's supporters were two staunch defenders of the war on terror: national-security adviser Stephen Hadley, and Gordon England, Donald Rumsfeld's new deputy—an important shift that suggested Rumsfeld had qualms of his own.

Staffers were dispatched to write up the new policies. But in the end, nothing came of them. Cheney and Addington, who usually stayed silent at meetings, used their influence afterward to kill the ideas, according to three administration officials who asked for anonymity to avoid crossing the vice president. "Each time, [we] hit a brick wall—the vice president's office and Addington," says one of the officials. The vice president's office declined to comment for this story beyond saying that Cheney "is motivated first and foremost in support of policies that will save American lives from a brutal enemy that has declared war on us."

Cheney relied on Addington to help him wrestle with the bureaucracy. "He knows it inside and out," says Juleanna Glover Weiss, Cheney's former press secretary. "He's a master of the Rube Goldberg-esque workings of the executive branch." Friends marvel at his ability to wade through hundreds of pages of turgid government reports to seize upon the one fact he needs to win an argument. "If you threw the entire U.S. budget into the air, David Addington could read it and mark it up before it ever hit the ground," says David Gribbin, a former Pentagon colleague. He could also be unforgiving. When a young Justice Department lawyer named Pat Philbin crossed Addington in a policy dispute, Addington made it his mission to block Philbin's promotion to a top Justice job. Addington let it be known that Philbin was a "marked man," says a colleague who spoke anonymously to avoid clashing with Addington. (Addington and Philbin declined to comment.)

Cheney and Addington's single-minded devotion to the idea of a powerful wartime presidency has, at times, led them to ignore important political realities. In 2002, administration lawyers tried to persuade Cheney and Addington to back off from the policy of denying U.S. "enemy combatants" access to legal counsel. But Cheney and Addington refused. But by 2004, the case had reached the Supreme Court and the administration wound up abandoning the position anyway, before the Justices could knock it down as unconstitutional. "David could be principled to a fault," says Bradford Berenson, a former White House colleague. It's a quality the vice president and his loyal aide admire most about one another—and one that will help define the battles to come.

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Cheney Seeks CIA Exemption to Torture Ban

By David Espo and Liz Sidoti / Associated Press

WASHINGTON -- Vice President Dick Cheney made an unusual personal appeal to Republican senators this week to allow CIA exemptions to a proposed ban on the torture of terror suspects in U.S. custody, according to participants in a closed-door session.

Cheney told his audience the United States doesn't engage in torture, these participants added, even though he said the administration needed an exemption from any legislation banning "cruel, inhuman or degrading" treatment in case the president decided one was necessary to prevent a terrorist attack.

The vice president made his comments at a regular weekly private meeting of Senate Republican senators, according to several lawmakers who attended. Cheney often attends the meetings, a chance for the rank-and-file to discuss legislative strategy, but he rarely speaks.

In this case, the room was cleared of aides before the vice president began his remarks, said by one senator to include a reference to classified material. The officials who disclosed the events spoke on condition of anonymity, citing the confidential nature of the discussion.

"The vice president's office doesn't have any comment on a private meeting with members of the Senate," Steve Schmidt, a spokesman for Cheney, said on Friday.

The vice president drew support from at least one lawmaker, Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama, while Arizona Sen. John McCain dissented, officials said.

McCain, who was tortured while held as a prisoner during the Vietnam War, is the chief Senate sponsor of an anti-torture provision that has twice cleared the Senate and triggered veto threats from the White House.

Cheney's decision to speak at the meeting underscored both his role as White House point man on the contentious issue and the importance the administration attaches to it.

The vice president made his appeal at a time Congress is struggling with the torture issue in light of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal and allegations of mistreatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The United States houses about 500 detainees at the naval base there, many of them captured in Afghanistan.

Additionally, human rights organizations contend the United States turns detainees over to other countries that it knows will use torture to try and extract intelligence information.

Cheney's appeal came two days before a former senior State Department official claimed in an interview with National Public Radio's "Morning Edition" that he had traced paperwork back to Cheney's office that he believes led to U.S. troops abusing prisoners in Iraq.

"It was clear to me there that there was a visible audit trail from the vice president's office through the secretary of defense down to the commanders in the field," Lawrence Wilkerson, a former colonel who was Secretary of State Colin Powell's chief of staff during President Bush's first term, said Thursday.

Wilkerson said the view of Cheney's office was put in "carefully couched" terms but that to a soldier in the field it meant sometimes using interrogation techniques that "were not in accordance with the spirit of the Geneva Conventions and the law of war." He said he no longer has access to the paperwork.

Cheney spokeswoman Jennifer Mayfield declined to comment on Wilkerson's remarks.

The Senate recently approved a provision banning the "cruel, inhuman or degrading" treatment of detainees in U.S. custody. The vote was 90-9, and an identical provision was added to a second measure on a voice vote on Friday.

Comparable House legislation does not include a similar provision, and it is not clear whether anti-torture language will be included in either of two large defense measures Congress hopes to send to Bush's desk later this year.

The White House initially tried to kill the anti-torture provision while it was pending in the Senate, then switched course to lobby for an exemption in cases of "clandestine counterterrorism operations conducted abroad, with respect to terrorists who are not citizens of the United States." The president would have to approve the exemption, and Defense Department personnel could not be involved. In addition, any activity would have to be consistent with the Constitution, federal law and U.S. treaty obligations, according to draft changes in the exemption the White House is seeking.

Cheney also has met several times with McCain, including one session that CIA Director Porter Goss attended in a secure room in the Capitol.

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Missing Soldier's Family Gets Update

By LOLITA C. BALDOR, Associated Press WriterSat Nov 5, 8:08 AM ET

Carolyn and Keith Maupin walked into the Pentagon Friday hoping for any new bits of information about their son, who was captured by insurgents near Baghdad more than 18 months ago.

They left after more than two hours, saying defense officials assured them the military is continuing to search for Army Reserve Sgt. Keith "Matt" Maupin. But they got no definitive answer to the question that haunts them most: Is he still alive?

"Even though you see a smile, your heart still aches," Carolyn Maupin told a reporter after the meeting, as she and her husband visited the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, both wearing pins bearing a photo of their son.

Surrounded by journalists and escorted by two Army officials, Keith Maupin — wearing a POW-MIA hat — said he believes "they'll find something soon. They'll find him." He said he and his wife went to the somber Vietnam Wall because, "There are 50,000 names on that wall, and I just wanted to say thanks."

The Maupins met with Lt. Gen. James L. Campbell, the Director of the Army Staff, as well as officials from the Casualty Assistance Office and the Joint Personnel Recovery Office. They also had a video conference call with senior officers in Iraq, including officials from U.S. Central Command.

Asked whether they learned anything new, they said nothing.

"We will not discuss the specifics of the update because it is an ongoing operation and saying anything could be detrimental to Matt's safe return and the safety of those involved in the search," they said in a written statement.

The statement continued, "It has been more than 18 months since he was captured, and we pray every day for him and the soldiers who continue to search for him. We ask the American people to do the same."

Army officials said Friday that Sgt. Maupin's status remains unchanged, and he is still considered captured. He is the only soldier who is missing or currently considered captured in the Iraq War.

The officials who met with the Maupins were expected to provide the family with more details of the ongoing search for their son, including reports that a Fort Drum, N.Y.-based Army unit spent seven hours Saturday searching for his body in the Abu Ghraib area west of Baghdad.

The Batavia, Ohio, soldier has been missing since April 9, 2004, when his fuel truck convoy was ambushed by insurgents west of Baghdad after leaving camp. He was 20 at the time.

A week later, Arab television network Al-Jazeera released a videotape showing Maupin sitting on the floor surrounded by five masked men holding automatic rifles.

That June, Al-Jazeera released another tape purporting to show a U.S. soldier being shot. But the dark and grainy tape showed only the back of the victim's head and did not show the actual shooting. The Army ruled it was inconclusive.

The Maupins said Friday's meeting — which also included a private lunch in the Pentagon — was helpful, and showed the Army is following leads on their son's whereabouts.

And it seems other Ohio residents are also following the progress. As the Maupins walked near the Vietnam Memorial, they were greeted by Jeffrey and Courtney Neal, who were visiting Washington, D.C., from Harrison, Ohio.

"We're praying for you guys, hang in there," Jeffrey Neal told the Maupins, as the couples embraced.