Halliburton accusations false

RE: Halliburton accusations not so false

NYT on Dec. 11

Pentagon Finds Halliburton Overcharged on Iraq Contracts

By DOUGLAS JEHL 6:37 PM ET

The Pentagon found evidence of violations in billions of dollars worth of reconstruction contracts for Iraq that were awarded to Halliburton.

>when we're trying to build a war-torn country

>and

>>>if we sat around waiting for the bearucratic bidding

>process

>>>to be completed, even on an expedited basis, highly

>valuable

>>>time would be lost?

>>Gee, I don't know, Doug. Do YOU know of any specific

>examples

>>of the situation you're describing? Or are you just making

>>shit up again?

>First of all, YOU are the one making the accusations of

>wrongdoing - that it was corrupt to award the contracts to

>Halliburton. As the one tossing around the accusations, it's

>your burden to present some support for it.

It's odd you say that, Doug, given the fact that when others ask you to present evidence to back up what YOU say you usually reply with remarks like "I won't do research for you" or "If you don't believe me who gives a fuck." You remember saying those things, don't you?

>Do you have any

>evidence that Cheney influenced the selection process?

Since Cheney routinely refuses to disclose even the names of people with whom he consults in discussing policy matters -- you are aware that he is currently being sued by several different groups on that account, aren't you? -- where would anyone get such evidence?

> Do you

>have any evidence that the process wasn't exactly how the

>Clinton Administration Official described it in his NYT Op-Ed

>piece?

Yes, actually, I do. If you will get off your lazy behind long enough to read those sections of the Federal Acquisition Regulation that govern purchases of goods and services by the Defense Logistics Agency, you will discover that DoD officials have vastly more discretion in choosing suppliers than that official described in that piece. The FAR shows quite clearly that the process is an EXTREMELY subjective one, and provides many opportunities for officials to put their finger on the scales. Whoever wrote that article has quite obviously never read the FAR.

>Second, the Clinton Administration has previously contracted

>companies on a no-bid process when time constraints or

>security concerns required that - including Halliburton. As

>set forth by Rich Lowrey, Contributing Editor of the National

>Review

His name is Lowry, not Lowrey, and he is the same person who recently authored a book consisting of absolutely nothing but hateful polemics against Bill Clinton. Asking him any question relating to Clinton you are about as likely to get an objective answer as if you asked Booth a question about Lincoln. He might also have trouble answering because rumor has it he is getting his lips surgically attached to Dubya's buttocks.

>So, did Clinton and Gore involve the United States in the

>Balkans to benefit Halliburton?

I doubt it. But the fact that Halliburton has won contracts over the years on a competitive basis, which it certainly has, and has won no-bid contracts on some occasions, which it also has, doesn't exonerate it of the suspicions which have arisen in the present case. It doesn't prove anything either way.

>

>>>And it isn't just a matter of having the capability to

>>provide

>>>oil field services but to do so in a very dangerous country

>>>which requires access to highly classified information.

>>

>>Yeah? And why don't you tell us of any FACTS you know that

>>suggest other oil field services companies would NOT be able

>>to do that? And if you do NOT know of any such FACTS then

>>what the FUCK are you yapping about? You really need to get

>>it into your pointy little head that you can no longer make

>up

>>a bunch of shit without anyone calling you on it.

>

>Again, the Government made clear that it chose Halliburton for

>the same reasons the Clinton Administraiton did - because it

>had been previously given security clearance and had

>outstanding capabilities to do the job quickly - better than

>any other company.

I'm afraid there was no way for the government to make such a determination without a bidding process, Doug. If you knew anything about the bidding process for such contracts -- and that information is in the FAR and the DFARS -- you would know that the whole point of the process is to allow companies to demonstrate their capabilities in that regard. Without such a process DoD is in no position to evaluate Halliburton's capabilities relative to those of other companies. That's why it makes absolutely no sense for them (or you) to say that the contract was awarded because Halliburton was the best company for the job, when they refused to do the fact finding that would be necessary to make that determination.

What does that remind me of -- oh yes! It reminds me of the way you say we shouldn't give terrorists due process of law. It reminds me of that because WITHOUT due process there is no reliable way of determining whether a person IS a terrorist in the first place. You and Bush seem to have this same habit of using circular reasoning.

>Since you're the one claiming that is

>false and is a lie, you have the obligation to demonstrate

>otherwise

I have already demonstrated that there is no way the government could know what YOU claim they did know. I think that means I win.

>Given that liberal screamers like you have been screetching

>about Halliburton forever, and Bush's approval ratings does

>nothing but go up as you do it,

Please give the lies a rest, Doug. According to the latest Zogby poll, Bush's approval rating is now below 50%, the lowest level it has reached since he was elected (?). Why do you keep LYING about that?

>Again, the Government made clear that it chose Halliburton for

>the same reasons the Clinton Administraiton did - because it

>had been previously given security clearance and had

>outstanding capabilities to do the job quickly - better than

>any other company.

Of course that was the reason. Who the key players were was just coincidence.

Dick Cheney: Soldier of Fortune

Vice-president Dick Cheney has brought new meaning to the term "revolving door" says Bill Hartung, senior research fellow at the World Policy Institute in New York. His easy transition from the army to private industry and then to the White House has earned him millions, Dallas-based Halliburton billions.

http://www.corpwatch.org/issues/PID.jsp?articleid=2469

RE: Doug is Speechless!

hehehe Our good buddy Doug who started this thread sure is quiet now that all of the media are covering the story of the Halliburton theft of millions of dollars...as verified by the Pentagon itself!

RE: Is Doug Devastated?

He thought we were all morons for thinking that Halliburton might have sinned and now he is MIA. Doug is usually all over these threads like a bee to honey. Should we worried about him? Is he en route to San Francisco to become a leftist under the new mayor?

RE: Is Doug Devastated?

>He thought we were all morons for thinking that Halliburton

>might have sinned and now he is MIA. Doug is usually all over

>these threads like a bee to honey. Should we worried about

>him? Is he en route to San Francisco to become a leftist under

>the new mayor?

Lucky, it's just another part of the Great Right-Wing Hypocrisy.

RE: Is Doug Devastated?

>He thought we were all morons for thinking that Halliburton

>might have sinned and now he is MIA. Doug is usually all over

>these threads like a bee to honey. Should we worried about

>him? Is he en route to San Francisco to become a leftist under

>the new mayor?

Any bets on what Doug will say when he finally comes out of hiding?

1. I never defended Halliburton.

2. None of your arguments predicted this.

3. But nothing I say will convince you liberal meatheads anyway.

4. So I'm going to go on talking.

Really, we wouldn't have it any other way.:*

RE: Is Doug Devastated?

And you forgot the most important retort of all..what about what Bill Clinton did?

RE: Is Doug Devastated?

>And you forgot the most important retort of all..what about

>what Bill Clinton did?

Of course!

1. It isn't happening.

2. Nothing wrong if it is happening.

3. Happened under Clinton.

RE: Is Doug Devastated?

Rumor has it that Doug will be returning to the message center by tomorrow. Welcome back, doug!

RE: Is Doug Devastated?

Back with his numerous posts putting us all down, Doug is still silent about Halliburton's stealing from the government.

RE: Is Doug Devastated?

>Back with his numerous posts putting us all down, Doug is

>still silent about Halliburton's stealing from the

>government.

I didn't see this trash until now.

I'll try to keep this simple, since I know I'm responding to Lucky:

(1) The only issue that is worth discussing is whether the U.S. Government did anything corrupt in awarding these contracts to Haillburton. Whether Halliburton is a good or bad corporation or overcharged for a particular product is totally irrelevant to just about everything.

(2) It was the auditors at Donald Rumsfeld's Defense Department who detected these overpayments and then publicized them. Doesn't that sort of disprove the notion being peddled that the U.S. Government protects Haillburton and is a party to its corruption?

(3) The amount that Halliburton would have received from these overcharges is . . . . zero. The overcharges, to the extent they are that (which has not been established), were the work of a Kuwaiti sub-contractor which is not part of Halliburton. Any money would have gone to the sub-contractor, not to Halliburton.

If you have any understanding of how these things work - and I know that you, Lucky, do not - you can picture a General Contractor building your house who hires a sub-contractor to paint the walls, and that sub-contractor then overchages for his work, which gets passed on to you by the GC. Only the sub-contractor is culpable and would profit from this overpayment, not the GC.

In this example, Halliburton is the GC, not the sub-contractor. They would not have made one nickle from these payments.

Keep screaming about Halliburton - nobody gives a fuck about it except for you and your ever-dwindling circle of conspiracy-theory leftist freaks.

And one last thing - anyone who thinks it's irrelevant what the Clinton Administration did with regard to these allegations is beyond help. If liberals scream that it's corrupt to award Halliburton no-bid contracts and that it's being done only because of Cheney, then pointing out that the Clinton Administration did awarded no-bid contracts to Halliburton sort of disproves that allegation, don't you think?

And the fact that libearls are screaming about things that occurred with the Bush Administration when they were completely silent about the same things occurring in the Clinton Administration sort of proves the intellectual bankruptcy and total lack of integrity of the people who are screetching these allegations, don't you think?

RE: Is Doug Devastated?

"And the fact that libearls are screaming about things that occurred with the Bush Administration when they were completely silent about the same things occurring in the Clinton Administration sort of proves the intellectual bankruptcy and total lack of integrity of the people who are screetching these allegations, don't you think?"

Is this directed at me as well? I thought the Clinton administration made more than its share of screw-ups and by the end of his term I was about as anti-Clinton as I am Bush. Well, not that far, but still...

RE: Is Doug Devastated?

If you want to see just how full of shit Doogie is on this, just do a Google search on "Halliburton overcharges". Of course, then he will trot out the charge that the so-called liberal media is being unfair to Halliburton.

If, as alleged, Halliburton payed 71 cents a gallon for the gas, charged the US taxpayer over two dollars per gallon, and then sold it to the Iraqis for about a quarter a gallon, who is getting screwed in this deal? It sure as hell isn't Halliburton.

Hypocrisexual...

You have to wonder, as this is a site about what many consider deviant sex acts, maybe people like Doug enjoy getting screwed by the right wing and its corporate donors.

Hypocrisexual anyone? ;o)

Also, speaking of hypocrisy, or at least yet another circular argument, he starts this thread saying it's only the Pentagon bureaucrats that award the contracts--without any outside influence, but then asserts that Rumsfeld/the administration had something to do with the Pentagon bureaucrats discovery of the overcharging...

Of course, no need to worry about that, as it's BS to start with (even if it came from some random person that happened to work in the Clinton Administration, especially as it was years ago now). Pentagon appropriations have been shown many times to be a nightmare, Bradley fighting vehicle, Osprey, anyone? There are probably some honest (or just lazy) bureaucrats, but the rest seem to fall into two ambitions: $$ or political. As the 767 refueling deal showed, there's long been a revolving door and it is still going 'round... here's Boeing promising the person in charge of negotiating a contract a top-paying job, nobody with a lick of sense denies that exists (so expect Doug's rebuttal... ); we're supposed to believe there's nobody on the other side, trying to get ahead in Washington by doing what the higher-ups obviously want? Remember, they have no influence at all over such things, except when it's politically advantageous anyway... :*

RE: Hypocrisexual...

we're supposed to believe there's

>nobody on the other side, trying to get ahead in Washington by

>doing what the higher-ups obviously want? Remember, they have

>no influence at all over such things, except when it's

>politically advantageous anyway... :*

If this is true, why did those auditors discover and disclose the Hallibruton issue? Shouldn't they be cowering in the corner, afraid that big bad Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld, Protectors of all-things-Halliburton, would ruin their careers? Why did these auditors feel free to disclose negative information about Halliburton without fear of retribution from Cheney and Rumsfeld?

Do you think maybe it's because this notion that Cheney and Rumsfeld stay up at night plotting ways to sacrifice the lives of our soliders and the economic well-being of our country for the sake of Halliburton's profits is merely left-wing paranoid drivel that is nothing more than the 2003 version of "the-military-industry complex-is-the-root-of-all-evil" sickness which, one would have thought, died a well-deserved death back in 1969?

Here's an Op-Ed from the Washingon Post, November 20, 2003, from a is a professor of public management at Harvard University, who, from 1993 to 1997, served as administrator in the Clinton Adminstration of the Office of Federal Procurement Policy.

He says that all of you who blabber about Halliburton contacts have no fucking clue what you are talking about.

_______________________________

No 'Cronyism' in Iraq

By Steven Kelman

There has been a series of allegations and innuendos

recently to the effect that government contracts for work

in Iraq and Afghanistan are being awarded in an atmosphere

redolent with the "stench of political favoritism and

cronyism," to use the description in a report put out by

the Center for Public Integrity on campaign contributions

by companies doing work in those two countries.

One would be hard-pressed to discover anyone with a

working knowledge of how federal contracts are awarded --

whether a career civil servant working on procurement or an

independent academic expert -- who doesn't regard these

allegations as being somewhere between highly improbable

and utterly absurd.

The premise of the accusations is completely contrary to

the way government contracting works, both in theory and in

practice. Most contract award decisions are made by career

civil servants, with no involvement by political appointees

or elected officials. In some agencies, the "source

selection official" (final decision-maker) on large

contracts may be a political appointee, but such decisions

are preceded by such a torrent of evaluation and other

backup material prepared by career civil servants that it

would be difficult to change a decision from the one

indicated by the career employees' evaluation.

Having served as a senior procurement policymaker in the

Clinton administration, I found these charges (for which no

direct evidence has been provided) implausible. To assure

myself I wasn't being naive, I asked two colleagues, each

with 25 years-plus experience as career civil servants in

contracting (and both now out of government), whether they

ever ran into situations where a political appointee tried

to get work awarded to a political supporter or crony.

"Never did any senior official put pressure on me to give a

contract to a particular firm," answered one. The other

said: "This did happen to me once in the early '70s. The

net effect, as could be expected, was that this 'friend'

lost any chance of winning fair and square. In other words,

the system recoiled and prevented this firm from even being

considered." Certainly government sometimes makes poor

contracting decisions, but they're generally because of

sloppiness or other human failings, not political

interference.

Many people are also under the impression that contractors

take the government to the cleaners. In fact, government

keeps a watchful eye on contractor profits -- and

government work has low profit margins compared with the

commercial work the same companies perform. Look at the

annual reports of information technology companies with

extensive government and nongovernment business, such as

EDS Corp. or Computer Sciences Corp. You will see that

margins for their government customers are regularly below

those for commercial ones. As for the much-maligned

Halliburton, a few days ago the company disclosed, as part

of its third-quarter earnings report, operating income from

its Iraq contracts of $34 million on revenue of $900

million -- a return on sales of 3.7 percent, hardly the

stuff of plunder.

It is legitimate to ask why these contractors gave money

to political campaigns if not to influence contract awards.

First, of course, companies have interests in numerous

political battles whose outcomes are determined by elected

officials, battles involving tax, trade and regulatory and

economic policy -- and having nothing to do with contract

awards. Even if General Electric (the largest contributor

on the Center for Public Integrity's list) had no

government contracts -- and in fact, government work is

only a small fraction of GE's business -- it would have

ample reason to influence congressional or presidential

decisions.

Second, though campaign contributions have no effect on

decisions about who gets a contract, decisions about

whether to appropriate money to one project as opposed to

another are made by elected officials and influenced by

political appointees, and these can affect the prospects of

companies that already hold contracts or are

well-positioned to win them, in areas that the

appropriations fund. So contractors working for the U.S.

Education Department's direct-loan program for college

students indeed lobby against the program's being

eliminated, and contractors working on the Joint Strike

Fighter lobby to seek more funds for that plane.

The whiff of scandal manufactured around contracting for

Iraq obviously has been part of the political battle

against the administration's policies there (by the way, I

count myself as rather unsympathetic to these policies).

But this political campaign has created extensive

collateral damage. It undermines public trust in public

institutions, for reasons that have no basis in fact. It

insults the career civil servants who run our procurement

system.

Perhaps most tragically, it could cause mismanagement of

the procurement system. Over the past decade we have tried

to make procurement more oriented toward delivering mission

results for agencies and taxpayers, rather than focusing on

compliance with detailed bureaucratic process requirements.

The charges of Iraq cronyism encourage the system to revert

to wasting time, energy and people on redundant,

unnecessary rules to document the nonexistence of a

nonproblem.

If Iraqi contracting fails, it will be because of poorly

structured contracts or lack of good contract management --

not because of cronyism in the awarding process. By taking

the attention of the procurement system away from necessary

attention to the structuring and management of contracts,

the current exercise in barking up the wrong tree threatens

the wise expenditure of taxpayer dollars the critics state

they seek to promote.