Monday, October 25, 2004

Media Slime-Trolling: Missing Halliburton Contract Controversy

It's been rough getting back on the horse since my self-imposed (albeit brief) exile from the blogosphere. I just wrote a brief piece about how big a story a stolen election must be and forgot mentioning this piece in Time magazine about Bunnatine (Bunny) Greenhouse blowing the whistle on Halliburton contracts in Iraq:
Greenhouse's objections, which had not been made public until now, will probably fuel criticism of the government's allegedly cozy relationship with Halliburton and could be greeted with calls for further investigation. Halliburton's Kellogg, Brown and Root (KBR) subsidiary has been mired in allegations of overcharging and mismanagement in Iraq, and the government in January replaced the noncompetitive oil-field contract that Greenhouse had objected to and made two competitively bid awards instead. (Halliburton won the larger contract, worth up to $1.2 billion, for repairing oil installations in southern Iraq, while Parsons Corp. got one for the north, worth up to $800 million.) Halliburton's Iraq business, which includes another government contract as well, has been under particular scrutiny because Vice President Dick Cheney was once its CEO. The Pentagon, concerned about potential controversy when it signed the original oil-work contract, gave Cheney's staff a heads-up beforehand.

I'm giving my kids the TV at the moment but I'll be interested to see if the worthless-ass media makes mention of this. This isn't exactly the story that a stolen election should be but it should be one of the top stories of 2004.

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