First we see that Vice President Cheney's former company, Halliburton, and its Kellogg, Brown & Root (KBR) subsidiary overcharged the American taxpayer billions (with a "B") of dollars on their no-bid Iraq reconstruction management project. Now it appears that Halliburton is angling to keep that money. It astonishes me that conservatives of ALL stripes (religious, fiscal, rational, social) don't see this as outrageous abuse of power by both the Bush administration and by Halliburton.
Punctuating this for me is a letter I received from someone very close to me. She forwarded me the comments of a US Army reservist who is stationed in Taji, Iraq, and who has observed first-hand the activities of KBR:
There are several civilian contractors mostly KBR(Haliburtin)sp.here. The remainder of the companies are being bought up little by little by KBR. We have several issues with KBR. They were suppose to take over the majority of our missions months ago and get troops rotated home. To date the only real mission they took over was the fuel runs to fill the generators on post. Their contract states using their own equipment. But they are allowed to use ours. They are full of promises but never deliver. They are getting payed huge amounts of money to do this but fail on a daily basis. When they fail a mission the soldiers feel the blunt of it. Its not right but we have little control. We can't counsel or reprimand the civilians. At our level we can't deny them the work either. The other issue I have with them is the fact they will not deliver fuel to a smaller civilian contractor even though its in their contract to support all of Taji. They won't help them out until they have bullied them into selling out to KBR. Once they become a sub-contractor then they get the help they need. One big political mess. If we only knew the whole story it would probably make us sick.Why is this story not being covered? Why does nobody care? Why, if we (American taxpayers) are paying for KBR to hurt both our own military personnel and local Iraqi businesses, is no one reporting this? Posted by jimj at October 22, 2004 09:03 AM | TrackBack