First issue I will touch is Halliburton
Clinton Procurement Official Steven Kelman calls allegations that the government rewarded Halliburton "Somewhere between highly improbable and utterly absurd." "One would be hard-pressed to discover anyone with a working knowledge of how federal contracts are awarded - whether a career civil servant working on procurement or an independent academic expert - who doesn't regard these allegations as being somewhere between highly improbable and utterly absurd. ... Many people are also under the impression that contractors take the government to the cleaners. In fact, government keeps a watchful eye on contractor profits - and government work has low profit margins compared with the commercial work the same companies perform. ... As for the much-maligned Halliburton, a few days ago the company disclosed, as part of its third-quarter earnings report, operating income from its Iraq contracts of $34 million on revenue of $900 million - a return on sales of 3.7 percent, hardly the stuff of plunder."
(Steven Kelman, "No 'Cronyism' In Iraq," The Washington Post,11/6/03)
Clinton's Undersecretary Of Commerce Says Halliburton Allegations Overblown. "William Reinsch, president of the National Foreign Trade Council in Washington, is a Democrat who served under Clinton as undersecretary of commerce. He said he disagrees with most of the Bush administration's policies, but thinks the Halliburton controversy is overblown. 'Halliburton has a distinguished track record,' he said. 'They do business in some 120 countries. This is a group of people who know what they're doing in a difficult business. It's a particularly difficult business when people are shooting at you. ... I don't think we went to war because we thought it would help selected American companies.'"
(James Rosen, "Is Iraq's Reconstruction Rigged?" The [Raleigh] News &
Observer, 10/5/03)
Army Corps Of Engineers: "No Reason To Think Halliburton Has The Inside Track." "Scott Saunders, a spokesman for the [U.S. Army] Corps [of Engineers], said there is no reason to think Halliburton has the inside track. 'We've never really done something like this before - gone in and tried to fix a country while it's still being terrorized,' he said. 'We wouldn't have competitively bid the contracts if we didn't think there was more than one firm in the world that could do the job.'"
(James Rosen, "Is Iraq's Reconstruction Rigged?" The [Raleigh] News & Observer, 10/5/03)
Then, in February 2003, the Corps of Engineers gave Halliburton a temporary no-bid contract to implement its classified oil-fire plan. The thinking was it would be absurd to undertake the drawn-out contracting process on the verge of war. If the administration had done that and there had been catastrophic fires, it would now be considered evidence of insufficient postwar planning. And Halliburton was an obvious choice, since it put out 350 oil-well fires in Kuwait after the first Gulf War.
The Clinton administration made the same calculation in its own dealings with Halliburton. The company had won the LOGCAP in 1992, then lost it in 1997. The Clinton administration nonetheless awarded a no-bid contract to Halliburton to continue its work in the Balkans supporting the US peacekeeping mission there because it made little sense to change midstream. According to Byron York, Al Gore's reinventing-government panel even singled out Halliburton for praise for its military logistics work.
So, did Clinton and Gore involve the United States in the Balkans to benefit Halliburton? That charge makes as much sense as the one that Democrats are hurling at Bush now. Would that they directed more of their outrage at the people in Iraq who want to sabotage the country's oil infrastructure, rather than at the US corporation charged with
helping repair it. (Rich Lowry National Review Editor Sept 22, 2003)
Under the Clinton administration, Halliburton received hundreds of millions of dollars worth of construction contracts for rebuilding efforts in Kosovo and Haiti.
In a deal cut in June 2000 under President Clinton, the New York Post reports that Halliburton won 11 Navy contracts worth $110 million to build jails at Guantanamo Bay, a base in Kuwait, a ferry terminal on Vieques, an air station in Spain, a breakwater in the Azores and facilities slammed by a typhoon in Guam.
