Features: CrossRoads

Check this link out in Vanity Fair; Unbelievable
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2007/11/halliburton200711

The People vs. the Profiteers : Americans working in Iraq for Halliburton spin-off KBR have been outraged by the massive fraud they saw there. Dozens are suing the giant military contractor, on the taxpayers' behalf. Whose side is the Justice Department on?

Vanity Fair Magazine by David Rose November 2007// Snapshots from the article:

The first logcap contract dates back to 1992, when Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney paid Brown and Root, as KBR was then known, to devise a contract for providing overseas support services to the military. Under federal law, a firm that designs a contract is prohibited from bidding for it, but this regulation was ignored, and B&R bid for and won logcap 1. (More than a decade later, the rules were breached again when Halliburton designed and then won the $2 billion contract to restore Iraq's oil industry.) Three years after logcap 1 was awarded, Cheney, who had no business experience, became C.E.O. of B&R's parent company, Halliburton, where he would collect some $44 million in earnings.

logcap 1 expired in 1997, and Halliburton lost its bid for logcap 2 to DynCorp. By this time, however, B&R was so deeply embedded in Bosnia and Kosovo, where U.S. forces were then concentrated, that the region was exempted from logcap 2 altogether. DynCorp was left fuming on the sidelines while Halliburton remained in the Balkans, reaping a harvest that eventually reached $2.2 billion.

In the April 2005 issue of this magazine, Michael Shnayerson wrote about BunnatineHalliburton the Iraqi-oil-industry contract. In the summer of 2001, she had led a team of Pentagon inspectors sent to Bosnia and Kosovo. The team, she says, found that KBR and its bills were "out of control." The General Accounting Office, now named the Government Accountability Office (G.A.O.), reached similar conclusions, reporting that KBR's Balkans operation was over-equipped and overstaffed to the point where "half of these crews had at least 40 percent of their members not engaged in work." Greenhouse, a former civilian procurement chief at the Army Corps of Engineers. Greenhouse had been demoted after protesting the decision to give

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. KBR builds America's bases and trucks in soldiers' food, cooks their meals, washes their laundry, and provides their gyms and Internet connections. When the Pentagon decided to outsource the repair of military communications equipment, this too was assigned to KBR. Soon, as Grayson points out, there will be no one left in the U.S. Army who knows how to fix a radio. This profound shift of duties from the military to private companies was supposed to save the government money, and it is an uncomfortable political fact that it has instead triggered a free-for-all of fraud and waste.

At the same time, 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.