Halliburton Contracts Illegal - But Bush Busts The Whistleblower

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By Evelyn Pringle (about the author) Page 4 of 4 page(s)

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Before making a final decision, Mobbs admitted that he briefed top officials from several executive agencies, in the Deputies Committee, to make sure they had no objections. According to Mobbs, White House Staff members were also at the meeting. After that meeting, Mobb's said that a White House official told Douglas Feith that the group did not object.

These disclosures prove that Cheney and Bush were informed about the Halliburton contracts on at least two key occasions during the procurement process.

So we've got all these high level officials plotting together for 6 months to set up a plan to hand Halliburton billions of dollars, and Bush and Cheney expect us to believe that not one of these guys uttered a word about contracts to either one of them.

And the media is no help.

During the Clinton administration, it chased after a stupid story about a 20-year-old land deal involving $100,000 (hardly the crime of the century) for 8 years and to this day, I still have never figured out what they were expecting to find exactly. I do know one thing, it wasn't that the Clintons and their cronies were accused of funneling billions of tax dollars through the bodies of our slain and injured young soldiers like what is going on right now in the Bush administration.

The media in fact spends very little effort and time investigating and reporting on the real crimes within the current administration, even when they involve fraud and corruption by officials at every level of government who are openly handing our tax dollars to war profiteers to the tune of a billion dollars a month.

I often find myself wondering whether the mainstream media has been bought off entirely.

Who's Next In Line For Retaliation?

The question is, who's next? Greenhouse wasn't the only official to report on the illegal procurement practices of the Bush administration. According to a report on an investigation of Halliburton by the Government Accounting Office titled, Rebuilding Iraq: Fiscal Year 2003 Contract Award Procedures and Management Challenges, contracts worth billions of dollars were awarded to Halliburton without full and open competition, including Iraq's oil infrastructure contract.

The GAO determined that the administration had violated procurement law when it issued various task orders under already existing contracts and that out of 11 task orders examined, more than half were awarded outside the scope of their contracts.

As an example of the inept procurement process, the GAO report described how "a military review board approved a six-month renewal contract with Halliburton worth $587 million in just ten minutes and based on only six pages of documentation."

After wasting millions of tax dollars conducting the investigation, the GAO concluded that the contracts should have never been awarded to the company in the first place and yet Halliburton remains the number one contractor in Iraq. Go figure.

Evelyn Pringle
epringle05@yahoo.com

(Evelyn Pringle is a columnist for Independent Media TV and an investigative journalist focused on exposing corruption in government)

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