Browse
our Frontpage

Halliburton receives $5 billion from the Army


Isabel M. Estrada Portales / AFP
07/08/2005

Halliburton, the company whose ads say “We're serving the troops because of what we know, not who we know,” is taking home yet another big slice of the Iraq pie, some 5 billion dollars worth of work, reported Reuters.

The commercial aimed to dispel the public perception that Halliburton's multibillion dollars contracts in Iraq were granted with some help from Vice President Dick Cheney, who was head of the oil services group from 1995-2000.

According to Reuters reporting the U.S. military has signed on Halliburton to do nearly $5 billion in new work in Iraq under a giant logistics contract that has so far earned the Texas-based firm $9.1 billion, the Army said on Wednesday.

Linda Theis, a spokeswoman for U.S. Army Field Support Command in Rock Island, Illinois, told Reuters that the military signed the work order with Halliburton unit Kellogg Brown and Root in May.

The new deal, worth $4.97 billion over the next year, was not made public when it was signed because the Army did not consider such an announcement necessary, she said.

Just as clamor for the possibility of closing Guantanamo Bay prison camp began to rise, and President Bush said that US was open to “alternatives” to Guantanamo, Vice President Cheney declared that there were no plans to close the camp.

A week after that comment, the Pentagon announced that a subsidiary of oil services giant Halliburton Inc. had been awarded a 30 million dollar contract to build a new prison camp at the US naval base in Guantanamo Bay.

The contract, which was competitively bid, drew fire from Democratic Senator Frank Lautenberg, a critic of past contracts awarded to Halliburton.
"After all of Halliburton's misconduct, why is the Bush administration giving them more contracts? Its just another example of how in this Administration, the foxes are guarding the henhouse," said Lautenberg.

Halliburton in April resolved a billing dispute that followed allegations that KBR overcharges for meals for US troops in Iraq and Kuwait. Lautenberg harshly criticised the Republican majority in Congress for failing to properly investigate Halliburton 's contractual anomalies in Iraq.

"The bottom line is the Republican leadership in the Congress is giving Halliburton a free pass," he said. "And I don't know whether that's because Vice President Cheney still receives a pay check from Halliburton . That goes on through 2007. On that payroll was stock options.”