gone for a Halliburton! occupiers to rebuild Iraq, only 2% has yet been spent.
Much of this has been further eaten up in unprecedented waste, fraud and corruption. The new government has also decreed a massive sell-off of state assets, with 100% foreign ownership allowed and tax holidays for investors.
The richest prize, Iraq's oil industry, has been put in the hands of a US-controlled "Development Fund".
Shamefully, much of what is happening
prize, Iraq's in Iraq is being concealed by the occupation's repression of the media. Sadr's in the hands newspaper has been closed, and the Arab TV network Al controlled Jazeera was recently expelled from Baghdad.
Journalists in Najaf were told to leave ... or be shot! Unfortunately indepth and unbiased reporting in the West is also hard to find, as recent studies of media coverage of Iraq in the US and UK have shown.
So a vital part of our solidarity work is simply to keep gathering and publishing the truth.
Solidarity is also being built through links between trade-unionists, the unemployed and other opposition
This enables us to offer practical aid, such as support:
for health workers in coping with both the daily attacks and the long-term legacy of war and sanctions destroyed infrastructure and a land littered with landmines, clusterbombs and depleted uranium. Another growing movement is the number of bereaved families as well as returning veterans who are speaking out against the war and occupation. All of these activities challenge the plans of The richest
Iraq's would-be conquerors and oil industry, their quislings to has been put 'restructure' the
country. Their model is of a USactually the old colonial one of 'Development skewed developFund. ment due
dependency, lead1ng to social inequality and rule by corrupt and repressive elites. In the case if the Middle East this is also catastrophically fuelling a global crisis of climate change, due to overuse of oil in our economies. The resistance to this in Iraq is broad and diverse, with problems and disagreements ahead. But the unifying demand is for withdrawal of foreign troops and their collaborators, as a prelude to working out for themselves whatever future they want for their own country. John Lister IT MAY have delivered little but continued repression, violence and destruction for many of the Iraqi people, but the continued occupation has benefited one group in particular - the shareholders of Halliburton, the giant US oil services corporation that has grown fat from a succession of wars.
Among those who stand to gain from the profits scooped up by Halliburton and its subsidiary Kellogg Brown and Root (KBR) is of course US Vice President Dick Cheney, who was its chief executive until 2000, remained on the payroll until 2002, and who still retains options on 433,000 shares.
Halliburton, which was a prominent contractor to the US Army during the Vietnam war, is an example of the increasing privatisation of the US military machine that has taken place during the 1990s: estimates suggest that the US occupation in Iraq employs one contractor for every ten soldiers.
Through the Houston-based KBR, it specialises in logistical support, transporting troops, food, supplies and weaponry, and the development of the infrastructure of occupation- milltary camps. It has delivered these services to US and other troops in Somalia, Rwanda, Haiti, and in Bosnia and Kosovo.
After 9/11, KBR also built 1,000 detention cells for the US in Guantanamo Bay.
All of these services are delivered on a "costs plus percentage" basis, in which profits are guaranteed.
But the company itself is willing to serve any customer with the money to pay: in the 1990S, under Cheney's management, Halliburton was one of the companies that helped Saddam Hussein evade UN sanctions.
The core business however is with the US government, and by the time Cheney stepped down as CEO Halliburton had government contracts worth $2.3 bilBut even bigger possibilities. have opened up since the invasion of Iraq: behind closed doors Halliburton was given a $1.6 billion no-bid contract, plus $800m in US funding, to restore Iraq's oil infrastructure.
Auditors acting on behalf of the UN are now inquiring into the value for money of these contracts for the Iraqi people, who were given no voice in the decision. The one Iraqi with a vote on the "Programme Review Board" which allocated the funds attended only two of its 43 meetings.
Halliburton is the biggest single beneficiary, having picked up four of the eleven contracts which the UN auditors report (by accountants KPMG) found to have been awarded by of the Coalition Provisional Authority in highly dubious circumstances -with either no competitive bidding or no evidence that normal tendering rules had been followed.
During its one year of existence the CPA allocated a staggering $19 billion of Iraqi funds for various projects, while spending just $366m of the $18 billion US funds theoretically designated for the reconstruction of Iraq.
KPMG point out that the USDon't ask me where all the money went! But guess who has done very well out of all the US wars since Vietnam? run CPA had no effective controls or procedures to regulate the spending of such huge sums of Iraqi money.
Paul Bremer, head of the CPA,
Halliburton is tacing a
series of investigations
around the world, including
one into allegations of massive bribery in Nigeria,
implicating Albert "Jack"
Stanley, the former head of
its key subsidiary Kellogg
Brown and Root, with whom
the company abruptly severed all links in June this
year.
The company admits that
Mr Stanley received
"improper personal benefits"
from the Nigerian construction project - during the time
when Dick Cheney was
Halliburton's chief executive. appears to have paid for 74,000 guards, though the actual number in post cannot be substantiated. In another example, 8,206 guards were on the payroll, but only 603 people could be found in post.
Questions are now being asked in the US House of Representatives seeking details of the $6 billion allocated by the CPA in its final two months before the hand-over to the current stooge Iraqi administration.
But more worryingly for Halliburton, a US Defence Department auditor has criticised the lack of proper scrutiny of the company by Army managers, and specifically questioned the justification for payments totalling $1.8 billion out of a total of $4.3 billion for expenses involved in contracts in Iraq and Kuwait.
The auditors went so far as to urge the Army to withhold 15 per cent of payments due to Halliburton until the billing issues had been resolved.
The company struck back by saying that if this occurred they would withhold 15 per cent of payments to its subcontractors.
page 16 of the scan
country LPM groups observed its 'No Land No Vote campaign in the 2004 national elections, before its impact started fizzling out.
Nevertheless, for the first