Tag: KBR

The question above is asked on the site of the Commission on Wartime Contracting as to their recently released report.

Remember the meme at the beginning of the War Drum Beating and the easy certain Corporate “No Bid Contracts” in support of the Wars and Occupations: “They’re the only ones in the World who can do the organizing and work needed in support of our Military and the Coalition of Willing!”

Never mind they were connected by the hips to those beating the drums, never mind they were only paper pushers tens of thousands of miles away and sub-contracting out all the work, never mind the many issues of lost billions, shoddy work, bonuses, waste and corruption that almost instantly started coming to light and even with that they were given more, not even handshakes, just here ya go Pallets with Shrink wrapped Blocks of Cash, Millions and Billions, freshly printed and minted!!

     According to DoD records made over $150 million dollars building Guantanamo bay’s detainee holding facilities, or, as other’s have come to call them, torture chambers.

    KBR, of course is one of Dick Cheney’s special interests friends.

    Kellogg Brown & Root, the nation’s top Iraq war contractor and until last year a subsidiary of Halliburton Corp., has avoided paying hundreds of millions of dollars in federal Medicare and Social Security taxes by hiring workers through shell companies based in this tropical tax haven.

~snip~

    With an estimated $16 billion in contracts, KBR is by far the largest contractor in Iraq, with eight times the work of its nearest competitor.

bostonglobe.com March 6, 2008

    The no-bid contract it received in 2002 to rebuild Iraq’s oil infrastructure and a multibillion-dollar contract to provide support services to troops have long drawn scrutiny because Vice President Dick Cheney was Halliburton’s chief executive from 1995 until he joined the Republican ticket with President Bush in 2000.

bostonglobe.com March 6 ,2008

 

April Stephenson, the director of the Defense Contract Audit Agency (DCAA), told the bipartisan Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan on Monday that Kellogg Brown & Root (KBR) is connected to “the vast majority” of alleged fraud cases in the Iraq and Afghanistan combat zones.

Plus, the majority of the $13 billion in “questioned” and “unsupported” bills to the Pentagon were submitted by KBR, reports the Washington Post. “KBR’s work accounts for 43 percent of the Pentagon’s audited Iraq contracting dollars”.

“I don’t think we’re aware of a program, contract or contractor that has had this number of suspensions or referrals,” Stephenson said…

Stephenson also revealed that some $553 million in payments have been suspended or blocked because contract officials questioned them or said they were invalid.

Since 2004, 32 cases of alleged bribery, overbilling, or other fraud have been sent to the inspector general for possible legal action.

 

President Obama has inherited a U.S. military different from the one Defense War Secretary Donald Rumsfeld described in 2004 as “the army you have-not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time.”

Unlike at the start of the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, the U.S. military is now almost completely dependent on private contractors for nearly everything but fighting.

Pratap Chatterjee, author and journalist, asks What will Obama do with KBR?

Obama needs to ask his Pentagon commanders this: Can the U.S. military he has now inherited do anything without KBR?

And the answer will certainly be a resounding no.

I caught this report, 12-22-08, and thought I’d pass on, especially if someone missed the report and is or knows an OIF or OEF Vet that might be suffering from something diagnosed or undiagnosed, or might want to get checked. No matter where you were In-Theater I would suggest that All Veterans of Both Theaters get Tests and continue to do so, we had enough problems about Agent Orange and the Gulf War I Vets with ‘Gulf War Syndrome’, denial from the government and apathy from the country!

US soldiers assigned to guard a crucial part of Iraq’s oil infrastructure became ill after exposure to a highly toxic chemical at the plant

They were bleeding from the nose, spitting blood.

There apparently were hundreds of American soldiers at this site that were contaminated.

And who do they and others accuse

KBR Inc. may have supplied U.S. troops fighting in Iraq with tainted water according to a Pentagon inspector general’s report that was released today: Audit of Potable and Nonpotable Water in Iraq (PDF). KBR is a private contractor that, at the time they were supplying American bases in Iraq with polluted water, was owned by Halliburton.

According to the AP, Water makes U.S. troops in Iraq sick.

Soldiers experienced skin abscesses, cellulitis, skin infections, diarrhea and other illnesses after using discolored, smelly water for personal hygiene and laundry at five U.S. military sites in Iraq.

During work today I caught the following on NPR’s Here and Now which comes out of Boston, and while it was a real nice, and comfortable, bright sunny day, My Freaking Rage Level Hit Sky High!!!

IRAQI WAR CONTRACTORS:

The Boston Globe reports today that the largest war contractor in Iraq is skirting hundreds of millions of dollars in US taxes by setting up shell companies in the Cayman Islands. The Globe found that Texas-based Kellogg, Brown and Root (KBR) may have avoided half a billion dollars in payroll taxes by hiring employees through foreign subsidiaries. But those subsidiaries are nothing more than an address, with no phone, fax or offices. The Boston Globe’s Foreign Affairs correspondent, Farrah Stockman, went to the Cayman Islands to investigate.

You can click here to bring up the audio of the show in Real Player. This is the whole hour show, but the report above is the first report and only takes the first 10min. or so.

In the discussion Ms Stockman states they Estimated the loss of payment at some $500million a year!

According to those in the corporate world, the fighting and the lack of security in Iraq is no longer a major obstacle to getting at Iraq’s oil. The real problem now is the lack of a favorable hydrocarbon law.

Meet Michael Wareing. He is Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s business emissary to Iraq. His job is to bring international investors to Iraq to help stimulate economic growth.

Wareing is head of a well-connected auditing firm and was appointed head of a new Basra Development Commission. The Basra region has 70 percent of Iraq’s proven oil reserves and according to The Observer, Oil giants are poised to move into Basra. Wareing thinks security is no longer an issue for investors in Iraq.

‘If you look at many other economies in the world, particularly the oil-rich economies, many of these places are quite challenging countries in which to do business,’ he said. ‘Frankly, if you can successfully operate in the Niger Delta, that is a very different benchmark from imagining that Basra needs to be like London or Paris.’

Iraq’s parliament has yet to pass a hydrocarbon law setting out the terms oil companies will operate on and how profits will be split. ‘My sense is that many of the oil companies are very eager to come in now, and actually what they’re waiting for is the hydrocarbon law to be passed and various projects to be signed off. That is what is causing them to pause, rather than the security position,’ he said.