Dick and Scooter's Haliburden

It seems that not only has no-bid contractee Haliburton overcharged the Pentagon for gasoline to the tune of $61 million (by buying it on the cheap in Kuwait and then charging several dollars more per gallon in the field in Iraq). But now the LA Times reports that the Department of Defense (DoD)'s Contract Audit Agency "found that Halliburton's system of billing the government for billions of dollars in contracts was 'inadequate in part,' failing to follow the company's internal procedures or even to determine whether subcontractors had performed work." And four Halliburton employees "signed statements charging that the company had routinely wasted money." Among the overcharges, the employees said that Halliburton had paid $45 for a case of soda, $100 "per bag of laundry" and had "abandoned nearly new, $85,000 trucks in the desert for lack of spare parts." Ex-Halliburton employee Marie De Young: "There was this whole thought process that we can spend whatever we want because the government won't crack down in the first year of a war."

Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA), (the guy who would be grilling the Bush administration into next Tuesday if the Democrats were in power in the House)on the reported involvement of Cheney's office with the Halliburton contracts: "He has insisted for months now that he and his office had nothing to do with the award of the sole source contract to Halliburton, and people in the administration have also insisted that this was done by the career people in the Army and not by political people. Well, we now have information from a briefing our staff received last week that, in fact the whole thing was brought to a meeting of the political appointees, including Scooter Libby, who is Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, and the reason it was brought to them is that they wanted to be sure that they didn't have any objection that they were going to go to Halliburton, even though there are other companies that could do the job. So I've written to Vice President Cheney and asked him for a full explanation."

More Waxman: "I've made no allegations. I'm simply reporting what the fellow that works for the Defense Department has told us in a meeting, that he brought this to Mr. Cheney's chief of staff, he brought it to the political people, and the decision was not made by the career people, but by the political people. So I've asked Vice President Cheney, without making any accusations about him, because we don't really know the truth at this point, we don't know the full story. But we do know that what he's been saying is inconsistent with the facts as we've now learned them."

CNN's Lou Dobbs responded: "Congressman Waxman, only in Washington could that be considered not an allegation, to suggest the facts are not in accordance with the statement. ... In other parts of the country, that could be called an outright lie"

So is Lou, who is on a personal cursade against job exporting companies, saying Cheney and Libby are liars? These are also the two who are under investigation by a grand jury for revealing the identity of Valerie Plame to scare ex-Ambassador Joe Wilson and others like him to reveal the truth about intelligence on Iraq. Something tells me these two are the center of all the bad things coming from this White House.