#13 / 2003 Peace Tour: Gleaning the New York Times

GLEANED NEWS AND POLITICS

#13

There is a magazine, “Utne” magazine, that gleans periodicals and then publishes interesting stories in whole as a service, I suppose. I guess I am doing relatively the same thing. The next few entries have been gleaned from Chronogram, A Mid-Hudson Magazine of Events & Ideas. I suppose I need to put and ideas on my own poetry publication as it is getting so far away from poetry. But truly, that is the poet’s job - to be the scout into the future, the harbinger of spring or evil - and that is what I am trying to do here by sharing some of this info I find along my journey.

I am currently quoting from the 4/03 issue and the New York Times. I haven’t given every accreditation listed, but pulled from the whole in general. If you want to know more specifics contact their websites. You can find the magazines on line at www.cronogram.com and www.newyorktimes.com.Halliburton: War is a family business by Pratap Chatterjee

A synopsis

by Pamela Hirst

“The Bush-Cheney team has turned the United States into a family business,” says Harvey Wasserman, author of The Last Energy War (Seven Stories Press, 2000).

“That’s why we haven’t seen Cheney - he’s cutting deals with his old buddies who gave him a multi-million-dollar golden handshake. Why don’t they just have Enron run America?” Or have Zapata Petroleum (Bush’s failed oil-exploration venture) build a pipeline across Afghanistan?”

Army officials disagree. Major Bill Bigelow, public relations officer for the US Army in ‘Western Europe, says, “…nowadays, there are very few defense contractors, but go back 60 years to WWII, almost everybody was manufacturing something that either directly or indirectly had something to do with defense.”

As bombs fell in Baghdad, thousands of employees of Halliburton, Vice President Dick Cheney’s former company are working alongside US troops in Kuwait and Turkey under a package deal worth close to a billion dollars. They are building tent cities and providing logistical support for the war in Iraq in addition to other hot spots in the “war on terrorism.” 

Halliburton is already profiting from war time contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

Cheney served as chief executive of Halliburton until he stepped down to become George W. Bush’s running mate in the 2000 presidential race. Today he still draws compensation of up to a million dollars a year from the company, although his spokesperson denies that the White House helped the company win the contract.

Note from PH: I remember when Democrats called for an early-on investigation a la Whitewater/Monica Lewinsky. Kenneth Star spent millions on that, took three years, and dredged up nothing but salacious TV ratings. The government threw a few bucks at this, gave Cheney a clean bill, and we never heard anything else about it. Very hush, hush and how convenient.

Anyway, in December 2001, Kellogg, Brown and Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton, secured a 10-year contract known as the Logistics Civil Augmentation Program (LOGGAP) from the Pentagon. The federal government has an open-ended mandate and budget to send Brown and Root anywhere in the world to run military operations for a profit. Brown and Root is also supporting operations in Afghanistan, Djibouti, Georgia, Jordan, and Uzbekistan. The overall anticipated cost of task orders awarded since the contract award is $830 million.

Approximately 1,800 Brown and Root employees have set up the tent cities used by the Army, instead of the soldiers doing the work themselves. Army officials say using local labor and third-country nationals’ labor is a fraction of regular Army salaries.

Meanwhile, north of Iraq approximately 1,500 civilians are working for Brown and Root and the US military near the city of Adana. They support approximately 1,400 US soldiers staffing Operation Northern Watch’s Air Force F-15 Strike Eagles and F-16 Fighting Falcons monitoring the no-fly zone above the 36 parallel in Iraq. The last time I checked that is better than the best 5-star hotels offering a better than one-to-one ratio for services rendered.

The joint venture contract, which started July 1,1999, and will expire in September 2003, was initially valued at $118 million. US Army officials confirm that the company has been awarded even more contracts in Turkey in the last year to support the “war on terrorism.”April 10, in the “New York Times“, a story entitled “Details Given on Contract Halliburton Was Awarded” by Elizabeth Becker brought a little more clarity to the issues.

Excerpts include: The Pentagon contract given without competition to a Halliburton subsidiary to fight oil well fires in Iraq is worth as much as $7 billion over two years. The contract also allows Kellogg, Brown & Root, the Halliburton subsidiary, to earn as much as 7 percent profit. That could amount to $490 million. Representatives Henry A. Waxman, Democrat of California, and John D. Dingell, Democrat of Michigan, asked the General Accounting Office of the Pentagon to investigate how the Bush administration is awarding contracts for the reconstruction of Iraq.

Rep. Waxman reminded the Pentagon that Cheney was Halliburton’s chief executive from 1995-2000 and received over $30 million in compensation. Since the attacks of Sept. 11, Kellogg, Brown and Root has won significant additional business from the federal government and the Pentagon. It has built cells for detainees at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba and is the exclusive logistics supplier for the Navy and the Army, providing services like cooking, construction, power generation, and fuel transportation.

Lt. Gen. Robert B. Flowers, the commander of the Corps of Engineers, wrote to Waxman that the company was chosen because it was the only contractor considered capable of developing “complex, classified contingency plans and then to carry them out on extremely short notice.”Bidding for the most sought after contracts to rebuild Iraq are limited to five American companies. According to “Chronogram“, those contractors are the Bechtel Group, Fluor Corporation, Parsons Corp, the Louis Berger Group, and of course out buddies at Halliburton’s Kellogg, Brown & Root.

Rep. Waxman responded to Gen. Flowers letter by asking, “Although the administration may have had valid reasons for giving the two-year contract to Kellogg Brown & Root for emergency work during the war, it is harder to understand what the rationale would be for a sole-source contract that has a multiyear duration and a multi-billion-dollar price tag.”

He also asked when the Army would replace the current contract with one up for competition. They’ll get back to us on that.