Quote from bungrider:
FWIW, HAL is not employing americans, from what i hear; they are paying iraqis shitty wages.
and, ironically, a french company is the largest oil svces company in the world (HAL's #2)
http://stacks.msnbc.com/news/958312.asp?cp1=1
from the above article, "Waxmanâs interest in Halliburton was ignited by a routine Army Corps of Engineers announcement in March reporting that the company had been awarded a no-bid contract, with a $7 billion limit, for putting out fires at Iraqi oil wells. Corps spokesmen justified the lack of competition on the grounds that the operation was part of a classified war plan and the Army did not have time to secure competitive bids for the work."
LOGCAP is, in effect, a multi-year supercontract. In it, the Army makes a deal with a single contractor, in this case Halliburton, to perform a wide range of unspecified services during emergency situations in the future. The last competition for LOGCAP came in 2001, when Halliburton won the contract over several other bidders. Thus, when the oil-field study was needed, Corps officials say, Halliburton was the natural place to turn. "To invite other contractors to compete to perform a highly classified requirement that Kellogg Brown & Root was already under a competitively awarded contract to perform would have been a wasteful duplication of effort," Corps commander Lt. Gen. Robert Flowers wrote to Waxman in April.
In 1997, when LOGCAP was again put up for bid, Halliburton/Brown & Root lost the competition to another contractor, Dyncorp. But the Clinton Defense Department, rather than switch from Halliburton to Dyncorp, elected to award a separate, sole-source contract to Halliburton/Brown & Root to continue its work in the Balkans. According to a later GAO study, the Army made the choice because 1) Brown & Root had already acquired extensive knowledge of how to work in the area; 2) the company "had demonstrated the ability to support the operation"; and 3) changing contractors would have been costly. The Army's sole-source Bosnia contract with Brown & Root lasted until 1999. At that time, the Clinton Defense Department conducted full-scale competitive bidding for a new contract. The winner was . . . Halliburton/Brown & Root. The company continued its work in Bosnia uninterrupted.
That work received favorable notices throughout the Clinton administration. For example, Vice President Al Gore's National Performance Review mentioned Halliburton's performance in its Report on Reinventing the Department of Defense, issued in September 1996. In a section titled "Outsourcing of Logistics Allows Combat Troops to Stick to Basics," Gore's reinventing-government team favorably mentioned LOGCAP, the cost-plus-award system, and Brown & Root, which the report said provided "basic life support services â food, water, sanitation, shelter, and laundry; and the full realm of logistics services â transportation, electrical, hazardous materials collection and disposal, fuel delivery, airfield and seaport operations, and road maintenance."
In 2001, after the Bush administration came into office, the giant LOGCAP contract expired again and another competition was held. Once again, Halliburton won the contract, and it was under that arrangement that the Iraqi-oilfield analysis was done. As the record shows, Halliburton won big government contracts under the Clinton administration, and it won big government contracts under the Bush administration. The only difference between the two is that Henry Waxman is making allegations of favoritism in the Bush administration, while he appeared untroubled by the issue during the Clinton years.
