OK this is beyond ridiculous.
At the end of the day all of these military contractors (Halliburton is but one) are raping US tax payers and it's got nothing to do with politics. This is just beyond dirty and if our country would try and shoot some of these executives for treason, I bet all of the companies would fall in line.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/25/wo...rtner=homepage
When Robert Sanders was sent by the Army to inspect the construction work an American company was doing on the banks of the Tigris River, 130 miles north of Baghdad, he expected to see workers drilling holes beneath the riverbed to restore a crucial set of large oil pipelines, which had been bombed during the invasion of Iraq.What he found instead that day in July 2004 looked like some gargantuan heart-bypass operation gone nightmarishly bad. A crew had bulldozed a 300-foot-long trench along a giant drill bit in their desperate attempt to yank it loose from the riverbed. A supervisor later told him that the project's crews knew that drilling the holes was not possible, but that they had been instructed by the company in charge of the project to continue anyway.
A few weeks later, after the project had burned up all of the $75.7 million allocated to it, the work came to a halt.
The Fatah project went ahead despite warnings from experts that it could not succeed because the underground terrain was shattered and unstable.
It continued chewing up astonishing amounts of cash when the predicted problems bogged the work down, with a contract that allowed crews to charge as much as $100,000 a day as they waited on standby.
The company in charge engaged in what some American officials saw as a self-serving attempt to limit communications with the government until all the money was gone.
The Halliburton subsidiary, KBR, formerly Kellogg Brown & Root, had commissioned a geotechnical report that warned in August 2003 that it would be courting disaster to drill without extensive underground tests.
"No driller in his right mind would have gone ahead," said Mr. Sanders, a geologist who came across the report when he arrived at the site.
KBR defended its performance on the project, and said that the information in the geotechnical report was too general to serve as a warning.
Still, interviews by The New York Times reveal that at least two other technical experts, including the northern project manager for the Army Corps, warned that the effort would fail if carried out as designed. None of the dozen or so American government and military officials contacted by The Times remembered being told of the geotechnical report, and the company pressed ahead.
Once the project started going bad, senior American officials said, an array of management failures by both KBR and the Corps allowed it to continue. First, some of those officials said, they seldom received status reports from the company, even when they suspected problems and made direct requests.
Although independent experts have noted that it is one of a handful of companies with the experience and size to handle enormous jobs like the reconstruction effort, KBR is often sheltered by a military that is heavily dependent on it.
-Rudey
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