Volunteers for a Better America

Halliburton and Federal Contracts

Griffe Witte in the Washington Post, here, discusses the continuing problem of overcharges for contract work in Iraq connected with Halliburton and its Kellogg, Brown & Root (KBR) subsidiary.  According to the report, Congressman Waxman's staff released documents yesterday, not previously available from the government's investigations of overcharges, that show "increasing irritation with Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown and Root Inc. as schedules slid, costs multiplied and the company balked at meeting demands for accurate cost estimates."  Halliburton's defense was apparently that these are "old issues" since the State Department had concluded last July that "Halliburton had been 'satisfactorily addressing most of the issues.'"  HMMMM. "addressing most issues" doesn't sound like adequate compliance for a company whose government contract accounting practices have been questions as far back as the Vietnam War.

The following links provide information on the ongoing saga of Halliburton overcharges. For background on overcharges on Iraq contracts at Halliburton, see the documents posted at the Committee on Government Reform Minority Office Website, here, an October 2005 summary of Iraq reconstruction at the DCCC, here. and a 2003 BBC news story on overcharges (quoting Bush's statement that Halliburton would be expected to repay any overcharges), here.  For information on concerns about overcharges by KBR in connection with Katrina-related contracts, see here.  For an interesting history of overcharges in connection with Vietnam-era contracts by Brown & Root (predecessor of today's KBR), see this NPR story, here.  For information about the Pentagon's approval of waivers for Halliburton even in the face of a history of concerns about overcharges, see HalliburtonWatch, here, and CommonDreams, here.  At one point, Administration officials redacted a Pentagon report to conceal information about Halliburton overcharges.  See this March 2005 Committee on Government Reform posting, here.  For more information about Cheney relationship with Halliburton, also see this story at CommonDreams, here.  You can also check out Daily Kos for a good bit of relevant information, anytime, here.

Waxman's solution--legislation that would limit sole-source contracting (see this story)--sounds like a reasonable one.  There should also be better enforcement when sole-source contractors fail to keep adequate records to support their claims for payment from the federal government.

CIA Black Sites

Nat Hentoff wrote an interesting column in the Village Voice in late February, asking "What are we going to do with the secret prisoners who cannot be tried in our courts?  He notes the London Sunday Times' report that intelligence sources claimed the CIA's top counterterrorism official Robert Grenier was fired in February for opposing the CIA's use of secret prisons abroad, rendering, and torture techniques like waterboarding.  Bush authorized these CIA "special powers" right after 9/11, but they will leave a legacy for generations.

Here's what Hentoff reports about the black sites:

• The House and Senate each passed resolutions in December seeking regular reports on secret CIA prisons, but the resolutions were killed in conference;
• The House International Relations Committee defeated resolutions, on a party line vote, calling for investigations into the Administration's use of torture and secret prisons that are inaccessible to the international Red Cross;
• There is no Congressional oversight of these prisons or prisoners: 
• The CIA itself has debated the legality of secret prisons and what can ultimately be done with the prisoners held there--will they become "the disappeared ones" of our generation?;
• Eight detainees that claim to have been held in a secret prison in Kabul and were later transferred to Guantanamo described their plight as being shackled to rings bolted into walls, deprived of food and water, kept in darkness with loud music blaring, and threatened with rape.

Hentoff ends with a question that we must all ask ourselves. 

"During the campaigning [for the 2006 elections], will there be any mention of the screams in the CIA's underground prisons of darkness?  And if there is, how many Americans will care enough to be repelled by their own silent, passive complicity in the growing moral darkness of this nation's leadership?"

Data Mining

It's small wonder that Mr. Bush's approval ratings are the lowest ever.  The Pew ratings show only 33% approve of Bush and a significant majority of 57% disapprove.  Only a minority of 40% think Bush is trustworthy, which makes it difficult for him to use the presidential bully pulpit to pull himself up by the bootstraps.  He is still trying, though:  Bush has been on the stump giving speeches and holding press conferences to (re)sell the American people on his war of choice in Iraq.  See this story.  He now says openly that he does not expect to still be president when we finally pull our troops out--in other words, it will be a long, deadly time in Iraq, if we keep on the present course.

Meantime, the concerns about abuse of executive powers in the name of a "war" on terrorism continue.  Poindexter's "Total Information Awareness project, which Congress shut down in 2003 by defunding because of strong concerns about privacy, has nevertheless continued apace in the Defense Department. It has just been funded by the secretive National Security Agency that seems, like the agencies modeled after it in fictional television programs like Alias, to have deep wells of funding, arrogance, and lack of concern for the law on torture, assassination or domestic spying.  See this article about the data-mining project.  The Pentagon transferred two TIA components--Information Awareness Prototype System and Genoa II--to the Advanced Research and Development Activity at NSA headquarters.  Given the new names "Basketball" and "Topsail", all references to TIA have ceased.  (Topsail's ARDA funding may now be in question, however.)

These programs, combined with NSA's warrantless domestic surveillance, are quite worrisome.  They appear to permit the government to undertake massive data sweeps of emails, blogs, and phone calls with almost no oversight from any group external to the administration.  Congress has lately come out of its complete turpor, with Heather Wilson's forceful statements about the need for oversight of domestic surveillance, but this is very little and very late.  As Paul Craig Roberts wrote last March on Counterpunch in an article on the effects of Bush's hegemonic militarism:

"It is America that has undergone regime change. The Bush administration constitutes a Jacobin revolution. Its fanatics have declared world war on political diversity. The first victim of Bush's "war on terror" is the Bill of Rights. In its place we have an incipient police state." 

And while I am not a fan of much of Roberts' economic philosophy, I think he hits the nail on the head in his February 6 "My Epiphany" where he writes the following:

The United States is undergoing a coup against the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, civil liberties, and democracy itself. The "liberal press" has been co-opted.  * * * * Homeland Security and the Patriot Act are not our protectors. They undermine our protection by trashing the Constitution and the civil liberties it guarantees. Those with a tyrannical turn of mind have always used fear and hysteria to overcome obstacles to their power and to gain new means of silencing opposition. * * * *If the Bush administration can continue its policy of picking up people anywhere in the world and detaining them indefinitely without having to show any evidence for their detention, it can do whatever it wishes.

Oil Spills

Big Oil and the Republicans in Congress are pushing again for invading the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.  They simply won't give up the fight to pollute the last pristine spot of wilderness on the continent.

And pollution is ultimately what it is all about.  The largest oil spill attributable to inevitable decay of pipeline infrastructure occurred in the Prudhoe Bay area Caribou fields where oil leaked out of a pipe for almost a week before even being discovered.  267,000 gallons of crude are soaking into the permaforst while cleanup crews try to vacuum it up in below zero temperatures.  See this New York Times story.   This--after everyone assured us that the North Slope production was safe and we didn't need to worry about a thing as far as environmental harms if we opened up the Wildlife Refuge.  The company's spokesperson admitted that they had seen increasing corrosion in the pipe at the leak, but (like all the slip-ups in these days of the Bush Administration's "I can do no wrong" approach) they say that "We had no reason to expect" that this pipe" was going to leak."

Let's hope that Congress is paying close attention to this spill.  It certainly provides one more reason for refusing to open up any more of the area for oil exploration and extraction.  If oil companies were unable to spot this leak coming, they will be unable to spot other leaks.  Any leak is disastrous, but some could well be fatal to the wilderness.

Consumer Protection--or for the Food Industry?

The House of Representatives has passed, with cosponsorship of Tim Johnson, Republican representative of the 15th Congressional District, a bill that would federally preempt most food labelling laws that provide important protections to consumers.  See this article in the San Francisco Chronicle.  Who wanted the bill?  The food industry.  Who's hurt by the bill? Ordinary Americans with food allergies, special dietary restrictions, and a desire to eat wholesome, organically grown foods. 

Here's just a part of the San Francisco Chronicle's description of the lobbying effort by Big Food.  Notice the connection to the White House team--Chief of Staff Andrew Card's brother just happens to be an important lobbyist for Big Food.

Corporations and trade groups that joined the National Uniformity for Food Coalition, which backed the bill, have contributed more than $3 million to members in the 2005-06 election cycle and $31 million since 1998, according to data from the Center for Responsive Politics.

The industry also has many top lobbyists pushing the bill, including White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card's brother, Brad Card, who represents the Food Products Association.

Here's what the organic consumers organization had to say about the action.

On March 8, despite massive public opposition, including 50,000 calls  and letters from supporters of the Organic Consumers Association, the  House of Representatives passed the controversial "national food  uniformity" labeling law, which would eliminate over 200 state food  safety labeling laws. The law basically takes away local government and  states' power to require food safety labels such as those required in  California and other states on foods or beverages that are likely to  cause cancer, birth defects, allergic reactions, or mercury poisoning.  The bill would also prevent local municipalities and states from passing  laws requiring that genetically engineered foods and ingredients be  labeled. Under the bill, hundreds of state laws and regulations would be  eliminated, including those relating to the safety of milk, fish, and  shellfish. In order to become law, the bill will now have to go to the  Senate for a vote. Because of the enormous public backlash against the  bill, Washington analysts believe the bill will have great difficulty  passing in the Senate. OCA and other public interest organizations have  vowed to go "all out" to stop this anti-democratic, anti-consumer bill  in the Senate. 

If you want to take action, WRITE YOUR SENATORS AND URGE THEM NOT TO SUPPORT THIS BILL.  If you are from the 15th Congressional District in Illinois, WRITE TIM JOHNSON AND TELL HIM THAT HE MADE A BIG MISTAKE IN VOTING WITH BIG FOOD ON THAT BILL.  If you want more information and other ways to take action, go to the organic consumer organization's website at:

http://www.organicconsumers.org/rd/labeling.cfm

Domestic Wiretapping

The Senate Intelligence Committee Republicans have rejected the call from concerned Democrats to initiate an investigation into the Bush White House's warrantless spying on ordinary Americans.  Instead, they have caved to pressure from the White House to rubber stamp the White House program.  Their flimsy claim--that a new subcommittee that will get reports on future illegal warrantless surveillance will somehow constitute a breakthrough in Congressional oversight.  As the New York Times editorial noted today, this is a "breathtakingly cynical" position.  " Faced with a president who is almost certainly breaking the law, the Senate creates a panel to watch him do it and calls that control."  The Death of the Intelligence Panel, NYTimes, Mar. 9, 2006 at A22.

The editorial notes that the seventies left us with "two groundbreaking reforms."

One was the Foriegn Intelligence surveillance Act, which struck the proper balance between national security and bedrock civil liberties, and the other was the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, a symbol of bipartisan leadership.  They endured for a quater of a century--until George Wl Bush and Dick Cheney left FISA in tatters and the Senate Select Committee on its deathbed in just five years.

The editorial concludes with an important point.  Let's hope that our representatives in Congress are paying attention.

There are moments when leaders simply have to take a stand.  It seems to us that one of them is when Americans are in danger of the kind of unchecked surveillance that they thought had died with J. Edgar Hoover, Watergate, and spying on Vietnam protesters and civil rights leaders.

Administrative Wrongdoing?

As Bush's approval ratings plummet to 34% in the latest CNN poll, and three out of every four U.S. soldiers in Iraq say we should pull out within a year, see here, Americans may finally be fully absorbing the extent to which this Administration has kept secrets, distorted facts, grabbed power, disregarded science, and bent over backwards to accommodate industry at the expense of the safety and well-being of ordinary Americans.    Here's just a sampling of the kinds of things we have to think about.

Back in October of 2005, the CNN News Poll showed that only one in ten Americans believed that the Administration did nothing illegal or unethical in connection with the leaking of Valerie Plame's identity.   Thirty-nine percent thought government officials acted illegally.  Another thirty-nine percent thought government officials at least acted unethically.  See this story.  Fully forty-eight percent of Americans thought that the Bush Administration has poor ethical standards, down from a high seventy-five percent in 2002.  Id.

Because of a spate of recent mining deaths, Americans' attention was drawn to the records of safety violations and apparently ineffectual enforcement actions by the administrative agency charged with mine safety.  Now, the New York Times reports, here, that the Bush Administration has had an active policy of "cooperation" with mineowners, which has resulted in fewer citations and lower fines.  Fines that are not collected within 180 days are supposed to be turned over to Treasury, but an agency spokesperson indicated that they had not been, because of a computer problem that apparently has no fix in sight. 

Environmental protection ranks high on most ordinary Americans' agendas for the country.  We treasure our national forests and want to protect the trees and the wildlife they shelter for future generations.  Yet it appears that this Administration is primarily interested in easing the way for the big timber companies to harvest wood.  An Oregon State University peer-reviewed study has suggested that the Administration has ignored science to let big companies rush in and clean up logs in national forests after big fires.  Such fire logging accounts for 40% of the timber cut on public lands.  See this Blaine Harden story in the Washington Post.  The peer-reviewed study was published in spite of attempts by some professors at the university's College of Forestry (which gets considerable funding from timber companies) to halt its publications.  Those professors had done an earlier study, not peer-reviewed but praised by the Bush Administration, that had praised post-fire logging.   The study will also continue in spite of the Bush Administration's Bureau of Land Management's attempt to cut off funding for the final year of the grant--it was cut off, and then restored after Democrats complained about government censorship and the politicization of science.  At a congressional hearing on the matter, a highly regarded forest ecologist warned Congress that it shouldn't prescribe salvage logging for every forest fire.

"Salvage logging and replanting can often succeed...if the intent is to turn a scorched landscape into a stand of trees for commercial harvest.  If, however, Congress wants to promtoe the ecologically sound recovery of burned federal forests ... the overwhelming weight of scientific research suggests that 'salvage logging is not going to be appropriate.'" Id. (citing Jerry Frankling, University of Washington College of Forest Resources).