I wouldn’t want to be working in Halliburton’s media relations office this week.
Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.) did his part yesterday in keeping the Cheney-“coordinated’ contracts story in the news by calling for a special prosecutor to look into the vice president’s possible role in the deal.
U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft should appoint a special counsel to investigate whether Vice President Dick Cheney helped his old firm Halliburton get lucrative deals in Iraq, a senior Democratic senator said on Monday.
The demand by New Jersey Sen. Frank Lautenberg follows questions over the weekend on whether Cheney and his staff played any role in Pentagon decisions to give billions of dollars of work in Iraq to Halliburton, run by Cheney from 1995-2000.
“This, in my view, could be a major government scandal,” Lautenberg told reporters in a conference call.
Bite your tongue, Senator; it is a major government scandal.
Also in today’s papers we see that former employees of the company intentionally bilked taxpayers — but congressional Republicans don’t want them talking about it.
Halliburton Inc. paid high-priced bills for common items, such as soda, laundry and hotels, in Iraq and Kuwait and then passed the inflated costs along to taxpayers, according to several former Halliburton employees and a Pentagon internal audit.
Democrats in the House of Representatives, who are feuding with House Republicans over whether the spending should be publicly aired at a hearing on Tuesday, released signed statements Monday by five ex-Halliburton employees recounting the lavish spending.
Those former employees contend that the politically connected firm:
* Lodged 100 workers at a five-star hotel in Kuwait for a total of $10,000 a day while the Pentagon wanted them to stay in tents, like soldiers, at $139 a night.
* Abandoned $85,000 trucks because of flat tires and minor problems.
* Paid $100 to have a 15-pound bag of laundry cleaned as part of a million-dollar laundry contract in peaceful Kuwait. The price for cleaning the same amount of laundry in war-torn Iraq was $28.
* Spent $1.50 a can to buy 37,200 cans of soda in Kuwait, about 24 times higher than the contract price.
* Knowingly paid subcontractors twice for the same bill.
But instead of exposing this fraud and holding Halliburton accountable, House Government Reform Chairman Tom Davis (R-Va.) has refused to allow them to testify under oath during the committee’s hearing on government contracting today.
And for those who find all of this too depressing, the fine folks at the Center for American Progress figured out a way to have a little fun with this story — “Contractopoly,” an online game that lets you “win billions in sweetheart deals from the Bush Administration as you rebuild Iraq.”