Iraq After Halliburton

Pratap Chatterjee, Special to CorpWatch

The Pentagon has taken an important first step by canceling the contract for Halliburton 's military logistics contract in Iraq and putting it up for open bid. Halliburton has only itself to blame for shoddy managment, over-charging and thumbing its nose at military investigators. In our three alternative annual reports on Halliburton , CorpWatch has uncovered innumerable cases of incompetence and corruption: for example torching brand-new $85,000 Mercedes trucks and charging $100 for a bag of laundry. U.S. taxpayers have paid Halliburton some $20 billion for such work supporting the administration's "war on terrorism" over the last five years. At the end of the day, they have been cheated out of hundreds of millions of dollars in unsupported costs and overcharges that the military auditors have disputed, but that the Pentagon has paid anyway. If the administration's sudden change of heart is really about fiscal responsibility, it should demand that money back. Today Halliburton has completed the major tasks for which it was hired, primarily building of five major military bases in Iraq...

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