Washington - The Pentagon is looking into complaints that Defense Department officials charged with building public support for troops in Iraq and Afghanistan might have engaged in improper fund-raising and unauthorized spending, officials said Friday.

i found it curious that the nyt article didn't mention haliburton, parsons, brown & root, etc. as possible perpetrators.  they have been retained to repair/replace the broken meters that measure the oil output.  it seems entirely possible to me that they might have a vested interest in not fulfilling this contract.  from an excellent alternet article by pratap chatterjee:

After the 2003 invasion, the meters appear to have been turned off and there have since been no reliable estimates of how much crude has been shipped from the southern oil fields. (The northern oil fields in Kirkuk, which supply the Beiji refinery in Iraq and export crude to the Turkish port of Adana, has reliable metering but little oil to measure since insurgent attacks largely shut down the facility.)

...

Neither US officials nor contractors have provided good reasons why, four years into the US occupation, the meters have not been calibrated, repaired, or replaced. One excuse is that the job of calibration requires special devices to assess the current meters and security issues make importing these devises problematic. Yet that and other security-related explanations fall apart given that the oil terminals are under 24 hour high security guard, lie more than 50 miles off-shore, and are accessible only by helicopter or ship.

There are two possible explanations: that the project has been delayed by bureaucracy or that vested interests benefiting from the lack of oil metering (such as smugglers or corrupt officials) have prevented the project from moving forward.

Skyrocketing Costs

The RIO II project, which includes the meter repair work, has come under much criticism, although specific details are scarce.

For example, the Bush administration issued Halliburton the RIO II order in January 2004 and gave detailed task orders in June. But despite not starting work until November 2004, the company charged the government millions of dollars for engineers who sat idle. Halliburton 's $296 million bill included at least 55 percent overhead. (In an estimate due later this month, SIGIR may predicts even higher overhead costs.)

A Parsons joint venture (with Worley of Australia), was also issued a contract in January 2004, given detailed task orders in June, and started work in July 2004. It has also been accused of charging high overhead costs while idle, although not as much as Halliburton . SIGIR estimate pegs its overhead at 43 percent.

In addition, in a series of scathing internal reports uncovered by Congressman Henry Waxman, supervisors Foster Wheeler criticized Halliburton 's cost. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers issued a "cure" notice on January 29, 2005, ordering Halliburton to do a better job or else. After Halliburton did improve its cost controls, the military turned over the southern oil work to Parsons in mid 2005.

"Halliburton is opening its corporate headquarters in Dubai while maintaining a corporate office in Houston," spokeswoman Cathy Mann said. "The chairman, president and CEO will office from and be based in Dubai to run the company from the UAE."
...
"This is an insult to the U.S. soldiers and taxpayers who paid the tab for their no-bid contracts and endured their overcharges for all these years," Leahy said in a statement.

"At the same time they'll be avoiding U.S. taxes, I'm sure they won't stop insisting on taking their profits in cold hard U.S. cash," Leahy said.

Halliburton, which was headed by Vice President Dick Cheney from 1995-2000, received several lucrative no-bid government contracts to manage the reconstruction of Iraq following the U.S.-led invasion there. ...federal investigators alleged Halliburton was responsible for $2.7 billion of the $10 billion in contractor waste and overcharging in Iraq.

In 2006, Halliburton earned profits of $2.3 billion on revenues of $22.6 billion.

"We have a lot of evidence about their misuse of government contracts and how they have cheated the American soldier, cheated the American taxpayer, they have taken money and not provided the services," said Clinton, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee. "So, does moving overseas mean that we won't be able to pursue these investigations?"

"Iraqi oil is regularly smuggled out of the country in many different ways," an oil merchant in Amman told The Nation magazine last month, Chatterjee says.
...
The smuggling and black market operations bear striking parallels to Saddam Hussein's tactics for circumventing the UN embargo. Saddam was accused of selling some $5.7 billion worth of petroleum products on the black market over the six years of the Oil-for-Food program, while United Nations inspectors turned a blind eye. Today, his successors stand accused of similar abuses

Beat up Halliburtion all you like, but it is silly to do it over a headquarters in the ME, and indicates a desire to rant withour regard to the truth. Such actions cause great harm by running off new converts and provides a self limiting funtion to the size of the "moonbat" world.

;-)

HOUSTON, March 11 -- Halliburton, the big energy services company, said today that it would open a corporate headquarters in the United Arab Emirates city of Dubai and move its chairman and chief executive, David J. Lesar, there.

The company will maintain its existing corporate office here as well as its incorporation in the United States.

Do you understand that the word "a" means that there are others?

As in "will maintain its existing..."

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