Wouldn't it be fun if Harry Waxman was allowed to hold war profiteering hearings in Congress?
Report Says Iraq Contractor Is Hiding Data From U.S. A Halliburton subsidiary that has been subjected to numerous investigations for billions of dollars in contracts it received for work in Iraq has systematically misused federal rules to withhold basic information on its practices from American officials, a federal oversight agency said yesterday. The contracts awarded to the company, KBR, formerly named Kellogg Brown & Root, are for housing, food, fuel and other necessities for American troops and government officials in Iraq, and for restoring that country’s crucial oil infrastructure. The contracts total about $20 billion.Proprietary information is protected by the so-called federal acquisition regulations, known as FAR. But the agency said KBR routinely stamped nearly all of the data it collects on its work as proprietary, impeding not only the investigations into the company’s activities but also things as simple as managerial oversight of the work.
“The use of proprietary data markings on reports and information submitted by KBR to the government is an abuse of the FAR and the procurement system,” says a memo released yesterday by the special inspector general.
As a result, the memo said, “KBR is not protecting its own data, but is in many instances inappropriately restricting the government’s use of information that KBR is required to gather for the government.”
The specific examples cited by the inspector general are taken from an $18 billion contract called the Logistics Civil Augmentation Program, informally known as Logcap, under which KBR provides food, fuel, housing, recreational facilities and laundry and other services to American troops, government officials and other contractors in Iraq.
and Diamond Dick Cheney seems to have boosted his old company's bottom line pretty well:
Halliburton stock was weak early ... in 2001. The stock bottomed out at $4.30 in early 2002 and rose sharply thereafter, eventually peaking at $41.98 this April as the oil services industry benefited from increased oil exploration and as the Iraq war continued [stay the course\.It dropped as low as $26.33 earlier this month, as oil prices fell. It closed yesterday at $32.15.
Tags: Cheney, /corruption
