Bush Administration Pays Halliburton For Services Never Rendered - Independent Media TV

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Under Reported
February 05, 2005
Bush Administration Pays Halliburton For Services Never Rendered
By: Evelyn Pringle
Independent Media TV



As of June 2004, the Government Accounting Office estimated that more than $1 billion in taxpayer money had been wasted due to illegal overcharges by contractors in Iraq, since the onset of the war. Furthermore, experts say that once the total is calculated correctly, the losses could very well add up to billions more.
According to GAO Comptroller General, David Walker, the $1 billion represents about 2% of the $60 billion spent in Iraq between March 2003 and June 2004. To no one's surprise I'm sure, Walker listed Halliburton's overbilling for meals as the kind of typical overcharging that is occurring.
Whistleblowers Ignored
Last summer, 5 whistleblowers, who were past employees of Halliburton, came forward to tell tax payers what was really going on in Iraq. They specifically described how the company was robbing tax payers blind with apparently not a care in the world about discovery or punishment.
Marie deYoung, is a former Army chaplain who worked for Halliburton, and then spent 5 months inside its Kuwaiti operation, said the Iraq operation: 'it�s just a gravy train.' She claims there is no effort to hold down costs because the company knows that all costs will be passed down to taxpayers. When she complained to her higher ups, they told her, 'We can be as dumb and stupid as we want in the first year of a war, nobody�s going to care.'
And they were half-right. Republicans don�t care but none of Democrats who do care have been able to do one thing about it. A Vice President "