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December 13, 2004
Unfogged
I've swung around to the belief that in early 2001 the word went out throughout the Bush administration to not make waves with Halliburton. Nothing else makes any sense of what we have seen:
Unfogged: Atrios writes, "...it's perfectly consistent to criticize the failure of this administration to properly supply the troops for an unnecessary war, and to also criticize them for the cost of this unnecessary, and increasingly catastrophic, war." One of the people at the party the other night (the Bush voter, in fact) is an accountant and had participated in an audit of Halliburton. He said their practices with equipment in Iraq were, to use his word, "ridiculous," with things just being abandoned instead of repaired. If I recall correctly, he said that the audit showed that Halliburton was only still using one-quarter of the equipment (meaning trucks and such) that it had originally had. (This was party chatter, so don't cite it in your brief to the DOD, but you get the idea....)
Posted by DeLong at December 13, 2004 11:34 AM
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Comments
And isn't it true that the people who are traveling around Iraq in armored vehicles are Halliburton employees?
Posted by: Dubblblind at December 13, 2004 11:57 AM
Somebody overheard one party chatterer claiming to be a Halliburton auditor and said:
>
> If I recall correctly, he said that the audit
> showed that Halliburton was only still using
> one-quarter of the equipment (meaning trucks and > such) that it had originally had.
Well, that certainly could be due to the fact that they wastefully ditched stuff given a cost-plus contract. That would be not so nice. There is also, however, the possibility that convoying stuff around Iraq has now gotten so dangerous that a lot of this stuff has gotten shot up or high-jacked, and nobody really wants to talk about that, either. The third (and least interesting) possibility is that this is still all just hearsay.
Posted by: Jonathan.W.King at December 13, 2004 01:20 PM