Profits or Profiteering?
In the November Vanity Fair, David Rose tells a story of massive fraud leading up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq and continuing today. The article appears to be soundly researched and makes essential, absorbing, if at times sickening, reading.
A couple of extracts, pertaining to KBR, a spin-off from Halliburton. (Emphasis added.)
The Department of Defense is easily the biggest federal agency, with a budget that has balooned more than 90 percent since 2000, to about $460 billion this year. Much of that increase has been spent on private contracting, which rose from $106 billion in 2000 to $297 billion in 2006.
KBR’s Iraq logistics contract was awarded in December 2001, almost a year and a half before the war started. By August 2007 the company had received about $25 billion from the D.O.D., and the funds continue to roll in at a rate of more than $400 million a month.
The Bush administration has special sensitivities to claims concerning KBR and its former parent company, Halliburton. Dick Cheney’s deep connection with the firm is well established. It is less widely known that former attorney general Alberto Gonzales, the Cabinet member who headed the Justice Department until August, when he was forced to resign, also has long-standing links with both Halliburton and its legal counsel, the venerable Texas firm of Vinson & Elkins….
Although Cheney was by [9/11/2001] vice president, he still owned substantial stock options and was receiving deferred salary payments from Halliburton, which have totaled more than $946,000 during his first five years in office.
war fraud profiteering corruption
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