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Impeach George Bush
Cheney DEFINITELY Got Haliburton the Deal
The Los Angeles Times reports the gorey details. Never mind the million-dollar-a-year bonus he gets from the services company.
Source: Los Angeles times, 2004-06-15
Candidate: Dick Cheney
WASHINGTON -- Pentagon officials have acknowledged that Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff and other Bush administration political appointees were involved in a controversial decision to pay Halliburton Inc. to plan for the postwar recovery of Iraq's oil sector, a Democratic lawmaker said yesterday.
The decision, overruling the recommendations of an Army lawyer, eventually resulted in the award of a $7 billion no-bid contract to Halliburton, which Cheney ran for five years before he was nominated for vice president.
Rep. Henry A. Waxman, D-Calif., who was briefed by Pentagon officials last week, issued a letter to the vice president yesterday demanding full disclosure of the top-secret process that led to awarding the contract to the Houston-based oil services company.
"To help clarify these important matters, I urge you to disclose all contacts between your office and the Defense Department relating to the Halliburton contracts," Waxman wrote in his letter.
Waxman's account of the Pentagon briefing - along with recently released internal Pentagon memos obtained by the nonprofit group Judicial Watch and a draft General Accounting Office report obtained by the Los Angeles Times - offers the most complete picture to date of the unusual procedures behind the decision to award the contract without the competitive bidding process usually required to protect taxpayer dollars.
Attacks by Democrats
The revelations follow a series of political attacks by Democrats against the Bush administration on the Halliburton issue.
Cheney repeatedly has denied that he had any influence over the decision to award the massive contract last March. "As vice president, I have absolutely no influence of, involvement of, knowledge of in any way, shape or form of contracts let by the Corps of Engineers or anybody else in the federal government," he said on NBC's "Meet The Press" last fall.
Cheney's staff stood by that statement yesterday.
"The policy of this office always has been and continues to be that if a staff member is approached with information about a pending government contract for Halliburton, the standard response is to state that we don't get involved in those decisions and do whatever is best for the country," one aide said.
Pentagon officials also have said that Cheney did not influence the awarding of the contract. They have said that officials with Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith, who was responsible for overall planning in postwar Iraq, talked with the vice president's office as a courtesy to warn of a decision with potentially controversial political ramifications.
A Defense Department official contacted yesterday said Feith's office, working with other agencies, "recommended" that Halliburton get the contract because of the company's "unique capability" to carry out oil-field operations in a war zone. He also said that bidding on a subsequent contract was later opened to other companies.
Speed and discretion
In an earlier interview, Larry Di Rita, the Pentagon's chief spokesman, said the process was done without bidding to ensure both speed and discretion in the months leading to the war. He said the final decision to award the oil reconstruction contract to Halliburton was made by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
According to Waxman, the new disclosures were made during a June 8 briefing at the Pentagon to Democratic and Republican staff from the Government Reform Committee, on which Waxman is the ranking Democrat. Rep. Tom Davis, R-Va., the committee chairman, could not be reached for comment yesterday.
At that meeting, Waxman said, Michael Mobbs - a special assistant to Feith - said that in summer 2002 he was placed in charge of the Energy Infrastructure Planning Group, whose job was to create a plan for the reconstruction of Iraq's oil industry in case of war. Mobbs did not return calls for comment.
Mobbs told Waxman's staff that he soon realized he needed outside experts to do the planning. He said he held "informal" discussions inside and outside the industry to determine who could draw up such plans.
By fall 2002, Mobbs had decided that three companies could do the planning: Halliburton, San Francisco-based Bechtel and Aliso Viejo, Calif.-based Fluor.
Mobbs told Waxman's staff that his group - not contracting officers - had chosen Halliburton to do the work because the company was already working with the military under a separate, multibillion-dollar contract to provide housing, food and other logistics.
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User Originated Comments:
From: new yorker
2004-06-15 12:28:46
the real reason bush and his thugs had to
immediately rush into iraq is starting to come to
light.
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