Salon: Fill 'er up -- with taxpayer dollars (Halliburton)

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Congressional watchdog Henry Waxman attacks Dick Cheney's former employer Halliburton for pumping up the price of gas in Iraq.

On April 30, 2003, shortly after U.S. forces toppled Saddam Hussein's government, U.S. Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., wrote a letter to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld inquiring about evidence that American oil services giant Halliburton Corp. had profited from doing business with countries that sponsor terrorism. He got no response. On Sept. 30, Waxman wrote to Joshua Bolten, the Bush administration's director of the Office of Management and Budget, with concerns about overspending and a lack of oversight in the reconstruction operations in Iraq. He got no response. For almost six months now the California Democrat has been asking the Bush administration to explain why Halliburton, formerly run by Vice President Dick Cheney, has been charging what appears to be five times the necessary cost of importing millions of gallons of gasoline from Kuwait into Iraq. To date, the White House hasn't responded.

The reconstruction of Iraq's oil and gas infrastructure appears to be costing American taxpayers millions of dollars more than it should -- dollars which are currently flowing into Halliburton's corporate treasury. Pentagon officials acknowledged as much Thursday, telling the New York Times that an investigation has turned up evidence that Halliburton may have overcharged the U.S. government "tens of millions of dollars" for fuel the company is shipping into Iraq. Waxman sees this as part of pattern in which the Bush administration is enriching its corporate friends -- precisely as it snubs key U.S. allies with its "macho unilateralist" approach to foreign policy. That will cost U.S. taxpayers dearly, he says.

"The Bush administration's apparent indifference to the evidence we've brought to them about overcharging, and their failure to respond to our previous letters, even though hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars are at stake, is astounding to me," Waxman told Salon in an interview Thursday.

Since the Bush administration declared the war over in April, Halliburton has been given exclusive control of rebuilding Iraq's oil infrastructure, with no other companies allowed to bid competitively against it. According to the Times, the company has since amassed $1.4 billion in U.S.-controlled oil and gas contracts. And in that time, Waxman has amassed information on the cost of Halliburton's operations in Iraq, sometimes with information provided by the Pentagon and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

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http://salon.com/news/feature/2003/12/12/waxman/index.html