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Halliburton is "Making a Killing" on the War
A BUZZFLASH READER COMMENTARY
Dear friends:
As Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld warn Americans today that we could be
in for a long war, as they go to Congress seeking more and more funding
for the war, and as newspapers report this week that firms in favor
with this Administration have been pre-contracted to rebuild Iraq,
please consider the non-partisan report on private military corporations
engaged to support, and in some instances, fight in US wars abroad,
prepared by the respected Center for Public Integrity http://www.publicintegrity.org (See the website for exactly who CPI is and for details on how this
report was compiled and by whom):
Chief among these PMCs is Kellogg Brown Root (KBR), a subsidiary of
Halliburton, which VP Cheney served as CEO between 1995 and 1999. But
keep reading.
Special Report
Making a Killing: The Business of War
(WASHINGTON, Oct. 28, 2000) -- Amid the global military downsizing and increasing number of small conflicts that followed the end of the Cold War, governments have turned increasingly to private military companies – a recently coined euphemism for mercenaries – to intervene on their behalf. A nearly two-year investigation by the Center for Public Integrity’s International Consortium of Investigative Journalists has identified at least 90 such companies worldwide. The ICIJ investigation also uncovered a small group of individuals and companies with connections to governments, multinational corporations and, sometimes, criminal syndicates in the United States, Europe, Africa and the Middle East that have profited from war commerce. Read more in ICIJ’s 11-part series. >>
Excerpts from the report, Making a Killing: The Business of War:
In 1992, the Pentagon, then headed by Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, paid Brown & Root Services $3.9 million to produce a classified report detailing how private companies could help provide logistics for American troops in potential war zones. Later in 1992, the Pentagon gave Brown & Root an additional $5 million to update the report. Brown & Root (now called Kellogg Brown & Root, or KBR) is a subsidiary of Halliburton Corporation, which Cheney, the U.S. vice president, headed as CEO from 1995 to 1999. Brown & Root was also awarded contracts in 1995 and 1997 to provide logistical support in the Balkans, where the U.S. military has been enforcing the 1995 Dayton Peace accord that ended the war in former Yugoslavia. Those contracts mushroomed to $2.2 billion worth of payments over five years, according to the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress.
Brown & Root is hardly the only PMC that raises questions about the revolving door. Frank Carlucci, who served as defense secretary in the waning years of the Reagan administration, was chairman of BDM when it acquired Vinnell; he is still chairman of the Carlyle Group, a merchant banking firm that owns BDM and counts a plethora of former government officials, including former President George H.W. Bush, his secretary of state, James Baker, and his director of the Office of Management and Budget, Richard Darman, as consultants, advisors, and executives. During Carlucci’s tenure at BDM, the company greatly expanded the number of contracts it had with the U.S. government; by 1994, the company had revenue of $774 million, up from the $295 million the company grossed in 1991, the first full year that the Carlyle Group owned the company.
Wall Street has noticed the booming business of both foreign and domestic PMCs. Security companies with publicly traded stocks reportedly increased in value at twice the rate of the Dow Jones industrial average in the go-go 1990s.
A September 2000 GAO report (PDF) found that effective oversight of Brown & Root’s contract in the Balkans was impaired by the government’s confusion about its authority over the contract and insufficient training of Army auditors, among other things. The report also found that although the Army had a process in place to review Brown & Root’s requests for "new work" or additional services – which comprised more than 90 percent of the fees paid under the contract – the requests were approved but not routinely reviewed. Between 1996 and 2000, the GAO estimated that Brown & Root collected more than $2.1 billion in additional costs, which nearly doubled the amount agreed to in the original contract. Brown & Root called the GAO criticisms "subjective opinion."
See
this page for a list of special reports that should be "must-reads" for
all Americans.
http://www.publicintegrity.org/dtaweb/index.asp?L1=30&L2=0&L3=0&L4=0&L5=0
This is bad. But it is only a piece of the iceberg.
The Bush Administration controls the White House, Congress, the Supreme Court, and most of the appellate the courts.
It controls the US media through the FCC (busily eliminating barriers to monopoly ownership of the airwaves, etc.) and through connections with corporate entities like Clear Channel Communications (See CHANNELS OF INFLUENCE By Paul Krugman, The New York Times, March 25, 2003, http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/25/opinion/25KRUG.html)
It
is poised to unleash the greatest threat to civil liberties since the
Revolution, in the form of the successor to the Patriot Act. This
bill includes the infamous capacity to strip a US citizen of citizenship
on the basis of membership in organizations not favored by Bush. (See:
Breaking News,
http://www.pbs.org/now/politics/lewis.html)
It is handing the nation's commonwealth -- the environment -- to the
wealthiest 1% of Americans.
It has virtually bankrupted the federal government's capacity to fund domestic programs of any kind.
It has placed virtually the entire burden of taxation on WAGE-EARNERS, absolving corporations and the investor class.
It wages war for profit.
It
lies compulsively and denies Americans the constitutionally guaranteed
right to hold our government accountable.
(See online histories of
Karl Rove, the Svengali/Goebbels of the 21st Century, http://www.counterpunch.org/madsen1101.html)
Please tell me where are our people of principle who will not tolerate
turning America into a one-party dictatorship? Where are Americans
whose patriotism and loyalty is to the Constitution, not to any president?
Is there no one who can stop this madness?
A BUZZFLASH READER COMMENTARY
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