Halliburton // Current

Two National Guardsmen Sue Halliburton,KBR over toxic exposure

claims government contractors "poisoned" them and over 100,000 soldiers in Iraq and... more

ryan8566
added this
4 days ago
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3 comments

Halliburton in 3D

Landmark, a brand of Halliburton, today launches GeoGraphix® Discovery™ 3D... more

Sexirobot
added this
18 days ago
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0 comments

Pentagon Instructs Officials to Cancel "Non-Existent" Contracts with ACORN

US Undersecretary of Defense Shay Assad, the Pentagon’s top contracting official,... more

Future_America
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23 days ago
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0 comments

Republican senators approve of rape

Hold the rapists and their allies accountable.

patomalley
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29 days ago
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Stewart Takes On 30 Republicans Who Voted Against Rape Amendment

In 2005, Jamie Leigh Jones was gang-raped by her Halliburton/KBR co-workers while... more

atomiclegion
added this
1 month ago
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66 comments

Judge Blocks Public from Blackwater Hearings

"A federal judge Wednesday blocked the public from attending a critical set of pretrial hearings in the prosecution of five U.S. security contractors accused of killing 14 unarmed Iraqi civilians in a 2007 shooting.

The hearings, which are expected to last through Friday, will examine whether the government improperly used immunized statements by the Blackwater Worldwide security guards in its investigation. The guards gave the statements to the State Department shortly after the controversial shooting Sept. 16, 2007, in a busy Baghdad square.

U.S. District Judge Ricardo M. Urbina said Wednesday that he was closing the hearings because he wanted to shield witnesses and potential jurors from pretrial publicity. He also cited concerns about the disclosure of grand jury material. Urbina said he wanted to ensure the guards received a fair trial.

The five guards -- Paul Slough, Nicholas Slatten, Evan Liberty, Dustin Heard and Donald Ball -- are charged with voluntary manslaughter and weapons violations in the killing of 14 civilians and the wounding 20 others. The Justice Department alleges that the guards unleashed an unprovoked attack on Iraqi civilians in Nisoor Square while in a convoy. One guard, Jeremy P. Ridgeway, has pleaded guilty and is expected to testify against the others.

Blackwater, which has since renamed itself Xe, had a contract to provide security for the State Department in Iraq.

The proceedings underway in the District's federal court, known as Kastigar hearings, will probe how well investigators gathered evidence without being tainted by those immunized statements. If the judge finds the government's case is tainted, he might be forced to throw out the indictment."

Fair trial? Throw out the indictment?

Contractors are mercenaries under a contract, hence the name, and part of the contract is that they cannot be prosecuted for crimes that the average American soldier would be under United States and International Law. Essentially, the have immunity.

So, when Blackwater, Xe, Executive Outcomes, Halliburton, KBR, BAE Systems have their mercenaries shoot up villages and revel in the plunder of heroin and prostitutes, American soldiers get hit with the retaliation, and in the case of Afghanistan, they're about to hit back real hard. Think Vietnam was bad? Wait til he Taliban start their "Tet Offensive."

These "peacekeepers" are now patrolling the streets of the US as part of an international police force. Google 'G20 police pittsburgh' and click on images. Remember, contractor=mercenary and they have no allegiance to the United States or the Constitution. They work under a different contract and they get private trials."A federal judge Wednesday blocked the public from attending a critical set of... more

rodstradamus
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1 month ago
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0 comments

Is The War Against ACORN Unconstitutional?

Any misuse or abuse of taxpayer money should be thoroughly investigated, but ACORN does not even make the top 1000 list of organizations that should be subjected to immediate and swift review. Shame on those Democrats who have engaged in this witch-hunt against a 400,000 member organization that has helped millions of poor and working class people while simultaneously continuing to vote for billions and billions of dollars in funding to proven corrupt organizations that operate above the law and above any effective oversight.

In any case, this legislative hunt against ACORN may be a moot point.

Earlier this week, the Congressional Research Service’s legislative department completed a report looking at the question of the constitutionality of the Defund ACORN Act. The CRS report raises the question of whether this legislation is punitive in nature and if it will “violate the prohibition on bills of attainder found in Article I, § 9, cl. 3 of the Constitution.” In other words, as Constitutional law expert Glenn Greenwald points out, “an act aimed at punishing a single party without a trial.” From the CRS report:

The two main criteria which the courts would likely look to in order to determine whether legislation is a bill of attainder are (1) whether “specific” individuals or entities are affected by the statute, and (2) whether the legislation inflicts a “punishment” on those individuals. Under the instant bills, the fact that ACORN and its affiliates are named in the legislation for differential treatment would appear to meet a per se criteria for specificity.

[…]

While the regulatory purpose of ensuring that federal funds are properly spent is a legitimate one, it is not clear that imposing a permanent government-wide ban on contracting with or providing grants to ACORN fits that purpose, at least when the ban is applied to ACORN and its affiliates jointly and severally. In theory, under the House bill, the behavior of a single employee from a single affiliate could affect not only ACORN but all of its 361 affiliates. Thus, there may be issues raised by characterizing this legislation as purely regulatory in nature. While the Supreme Court has noted that the courts will generally defer to Congress as to the regulatory purpose of a statute absent clear proof of punitive intent, there appear to be potential issues raised with attempting to find a rational non-punitive regulatory purpose for this legislation. Thus, it appears that a court may have a sufficient basis to overcome the presumption of constitutionality, and find that it violates the prohibition against bills of attainder.

More @ linkAny misuse or abuse of taxpayer money should be thoroughly investigated, but ACORN... more

Future_America
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1 month ago
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3 comments

Rep. Alan Grayson on de-funding corrupt defense contractors

Glenn Greenwald-

Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.) -- my guest on Salon Radio today -- yesterday pointed out that the bill passed by both the Senate and House to de-fund ACORN is written so broadly that it literally compels the de-funding not only of that group, but also the de-funding of, and denial of all government contracts to, any corporation that "has filed a fraudulent form with any Federal or State regulatory agency." By definition, that includes virtually every large defense contractor, which -- unlike ACORN -- has actually been found guilty of fraud. As The Huffington Post's Ryan Grim put it: "the bill could plausibly defund the entire military-industrial complex. Whoops."

I spoke with Rep. Grayson this morning regarding the consequences of all of this. He is currently compiling a list of all defense contractors encompassed by this language in order to send to administration officials (and has asked for help from the public in compiling that list, here). The President is required by the Constitution to "faithfully execute" the law, which should mean that no more contracts can be awarded to any companies on that list, which happens to include the ten largest defense contractors in America. Before being elected to Congress, Grayson worked extensively on uncovering and combating defense contractor fraud in Iraq, and I asked him to put into context ACORN's impact on the American taxpayer versus these corrupt defense contractors. His reply: "The amount of money that ACORN has received in the past 20 years altogether is roughly equal to what the taxpayer paid to Haillburton each day during the war in Iraq."

The irony of all of this is that the Congress is attempting to accomplish an unconstitutional act: singling out and punishing ACORN, which is clearly a "bill of attainder" that the Constitution explicitly prohibits -- i.e., an act aimed at punishing a single party without a trial. The only way to overcome that problem is by pretending that the de-funding of ACORN is really about a general policy judgment (that no corrupt organizations should receive federal funding). But the broader they make the law in order to avoid the Constitutional problem, the more it encompasses the large corrupt corporations that own the Congress (and whom they obviously don't want to de-fund). The narrower they make it in order to include only ACORN, the more blatantly unconstitutional it is. Now that they have embraced this general principle that no corrupt organizations should receive federal funding, how is anyone going to justify applying that only to ACORN while continuing to fund the corporations whose fraud and corruption is vastly greater (not to mention established by actual courts of law)?

My discussion with Rep. Grayson is roughly 10 minutes long and can be heard by clicking PLAY on the recorder below. A transcript will be posted later today.Glenn Greenwald- Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.) -- my guest on Salon Radio today --... more

RFIDemocracy
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1 month ago
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KBR: Cheney and Halliburton's Dirty Little Secret

Why is KBR rarely discussed by the media?

JaminDime
added this
2 months ago
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0 comments

Strengthen Safe Drinking Water Act, comment deadline August 12th

Close Halliburton Loophole.

harryosibin
added this
3 months ago
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0 comments

KBR (Once owned by Halliburton) profits jump 40% on acquisition, government contracts

KBR said profit jumped 40 percent in the second quarter on contributions from a newly acquired construction company, an increase in work on several global oil and gas projects and better returns from government contracting work in Iraq and elsewhere.

The Houston-based engineering and construction firm and government contractor said net income rose to $67 million, 42 cents per share, from $48 million, 28 cents per share, in the second quarter of 2008. Revenue climbed 17 percent to $3.1 billion, up from $2.7 billion in the April-June period a year ago.

Wall Street analysts had predicted profit of 41 cents a share and revenue of $2.9 billion.

KBR shares rose 86 cents to $20.45 in morning trading on the New York Stock Exchange.

“Overall, I'm pleased with KBR's second quarter results,” said Chairman and CEO Bill Utt, in a conference call this morning to discuss the company's second-quarter results.

But the Houston-based company warned that its U.S. troop support work in Afghanistan will begin to wind down in coming months as other contractors take over and will also decline in Iraq amid planned American troop withdrawls.

The company, spun off from oil field services giant Halliburton in 2007, has been the exclusive provider of nonmilitary services to the U.S. Army in Iraq, Kuwait and Afghanistan since 2001. In that role, it has served meals, done laundry, built lodging camps, delivered fuel and done many other tasks for American troops.

Under a new Pentagon contract, known as known as Logistics Civil Augmentation Program (Logcap) IV, KBR is competing for the same troop-support work with two other companies, Irving-based Fluor Corp. and Falls Church, Va.-based DynCorp International.

Recently, two major contracts in Afghanistan were awarded to the other contractors. Utt said today that KBR will not challenge the Army's decision on the contracts, but after being briefed by the Pentagon, believes the awards went to other companies because the government feels pressure to divide the work among several companies rather than giving it to a single provider.KBR said profit jumped 40 percent in the second quarter on contributions from a newly... more

WakeUpPeople
added this
4 months ago
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1 comment

Civilian Deaths are Good for Business

There is a strong correlation between civilian deaths in Iraq and now Afghanistan with... more

JonRaymond
added this
4 months ago
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0 comments

Oregon soldiers sue KBR for exposure to cancer-causing chemical in Iraq

Five current and former Oregon Army National Guard soldiers filed suit Monday against... more

slarabee
added this
5 months ago
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5 comments

Is Halliburton forgiven and forgotten for war profiteering?

In September 2004, Lesar announced that Halliburton was considering spinning off KBR as a separate company, in part he claimed because it was bearing the brunt of a "vicious campaign" of political attacks and its employees didn't "deserve to have their jobs threatened for political gain." It took three years, but in April 2007 the spin-off of KBR was completed. It is now officially on its own, and the results for both companies seem little short of miraculous. No protesters even attended the three annual shareholder meetings that KBR has since held, though its activities in the war zones have hardly changed, and only five made it to Halliburton's in 2008. This year, of course, the protesting larder was bare.

In reality, Halliburton's decision to spin the company off was surely tied to hopes that it might indeed escape a number of pending Iraq investigations and lawsuits, as well as tamp down the bad publicity KBR was generating. Still, those investigations are ongoing. At Fort Belvoir, Virginia, the headquarters of the Defense Contract Audit Agency (DCAA), the office in charge of reviewing the Pentagon's payments to KBR, a small group of investigators continue to pursue that company's failures.

In early May, at a hearing on Capitol Hill, DCAA director April G. Stephenson told the independent, bipartisan, congressionally-mandated Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan that, since 2004, her staff had sent 32 cases of suspected over-billing, bribery, and other possible violations of the law to the Pentagon inspector general. The "vast majority" of these cases, she testified, were linked to KBR, which accounts for a staggering 43% of the dollars the Pentagon has spent in Iraq. "I don't think we're aware of a program, contract, or contractor that has had this number of suspensions or referrals," she told the hearing. (In the allied area of overpricing services, DCAA also recommended $4.3 billion worth of reductions to proposed or billed costs and pointed to another $3.3 billion worth of costs under the KBR contract that they believed were simply not supported.)In September 2004, Lesar announced that Halliburton was considering spinning off KBR... more