From ThinkProgress:
| “U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld issued a terse warning to Iraq’s new leaders on Tuesday, urging them to avoid…cronyism that could lead to corruption and sap confidence in government.” – Financial Times, 4/11/05
VERSUS “President Bush has nominated Vice President Cheney’s son-in-law [lobbyist Philip Perry] to be the general counsel of the Department of Homeland Security.” – Washington Post, 4/1/05 |
And then, in today's NYT:
| erious cost overruns and "poor performance" have plagued the Halliburton Company's continuing $1.2 billion contract to repair Iraq's vital southern oil fields, a new State Department report says.
The news about Kellogg, Brown & Root, a subsidiary of Texas-based Halliburton, adds an additional layer of troubles to the company's multibillion dollar operations in Iraq. ..snip.. New questions about the earlier oil and fuel contract were also raised Monday when a Congressional committee released data from five audits of the program, showing that Pentagon specialists had questioned $212 million of $1.69 billion in bills that KBR submitted for fuel imports in 2003 and 2004. The data were released by the minority office of the House Committee on Government Reform. |
And finally, as Republican Congressman Ron Paul of Texas reminded us just last week,
| The oil-for-food scandal under Saddam Hussein has been replaced by corruption in the distribution of U.S. funds to rebuild Iraq. Already there is an admitted $9 billion discrepancy in the accounting of these funds. The over-billing by Halliburton is no secret, but the process has not changed.
The whole process is corrupt. It just doesn’t make sense to most Americans to see their tax dollars used to fight an unnecessary and unjustified war. First they see American bombs destroying a country, and then American taxpayers are required to rebuild it. Today it’s easier to get funding to rebuild infrastructure in Iraq than to build a bridge in the United States. Indeed, we cut the Army Corps of Engineers’ budget and operate on the cheap with our veterans as the expenditures in Iraq skyrocket. |
To say nothing, of course, about this guy.
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