Halliburton (or rather their subsidiary Kellogg, Brown and Root) is on what is called a "cost + percentage of costs" contract in Iraq. Now, this sort of contract is illegal when one is doing business with the American government (normally). Lord knows how they got away with it.
What this means is that for every dollar they spend, they get the dollar back plus an additional percentage of that dollar (their guaranteed profit). So they have an incentive to spend as much of "our" money as possible in their efforts to reconstruct Iraq. This contract skipped the regular procurement process and was simply awarded (the also rare "no-bid" contract). There is no cap on the amount of money they can make on this contract.
That just makes me ill. I'm just happy Halliburton have been busted for abusing this gold-plated cheque. The question is, will this rebound on Cheney and Co. (since he used to be the CEO of Halliburton and still collects deferred salary from them)?
According to a reference from Common Dreams:
Does the mainstream media even care how bad this looks? One would have thought it would be a front-page scandal.
The Cheney-Halliburton story is the classic military-industrial revolving door tale. As Secretary of Defense under Bush I, Cheney paid Brown and Root services (now Kellogg Brown and Root) $3.9 million to report on how private companies could help the U.S. Army as Cheney cut hundreds of thousands of Army jobs. Then Brown and Root won a five-year contract to provide logistics for the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers all over the globe. In 1995, Cheney became CEO and Halliburton jumped from 73rd to 18th on the Pentagon's list of top contractors, benefiting from at least $3.8 billion in federal contracts and taxpayer-insured loans, according to the Center for Public Integrity.
It just looks bad for the VP's former company to be given a contract that would make a bank robber blush and then have them brought up on charges for ripping off the Department of Defense.
So I ask the question again - is Cheney a liability? Will Bush II dump him before the next election using the pretext of a bad ticker and pick a new running mate without quite so much "baggage"?
Posted by artandscience at March 20, 2004 11:00 PM