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Groups want heavyweights to join Halliburton
contract probe
By Emad Mekay
Washington, DC, Feb. 25 (IPS)— US President George W. Bush
and Congress should join Pentagon and State Department probes into allegations
that construction giant Halliburton overcharged the US government for
its work in Iraq, to ensure accountability of other military contractors,
watchdog groups here say.
Activists from the Campaign to Stop the War Profiteers, initiated by
the North Carolina State-based Institute for Southern Studies and endorsed
by 50 organizations across the United States, say adding the weight
of the White House and Congress to the investigation could help guarantee
that controversial contractors are accountable before the US public.
Activists say that dubious billing and procurement practices have raised
questions about the quality of government oversight in Iraq and whether
the Bush administration is sufficiently protecting the interests of
US taxpayers.
From no-bid contracts with little supervision to manipulating gasoline
prices, Halliburton, formerly run by Vice President Dick Cheney, has
largely come to embody the secretive nature of awarding contracts in
post-war Iraq and accusations of hefty war profiteering.
“The scope of the scandals surrounding Halliburton and other military
contractors demands a full congressional inquiry into the politics surrounding
contract decisions and the performance of corporations that have been
given billions of taxpayer dollars,” said Chris Kromm, co-director
of the campaign, in a statement.
The groups say that hundreds of millions of dollars are being wasted
as a result of crooked conduct by contractors and sloppy government
controls.
Halliburton, the company that has been awarded the most lucrative contracts
in Iraq, faces a number of investigations in the United States. The
Defense Department is probing the firm after an audit found it overcharged
the US Army by $61 million for gasoline transferred to Iraq as part
of one deal, which was awarded without a bidding process.
Auditors at the Pentagon are also looking into the company’s food
contracts at more than 50 other locations, where it is said to have
overcharged by $27.4 million.
“A bipartisan, independent commission is needed to review the performance
of contractors under existing contracts and [to] monitor the letting
of sub-contracts,” said Keith Ashdown, vice president of policy
at Taxpayers for Common Sense, a Washington-based group that monitors
government spending.
The groups say they need more scrutiny of Halliburton because the Pentagon
official in charge of the investigation, L. Jean Lewis, is known as
a highly partisan Republican activist.
Lewis was roundly condemned for her ardent leadership of the Whitewater
legal case against Bush’s predecessor Bill Clinton for having an
affair with a White House intern in the 1990s.
The calls for more oversight of Iraq contracts come as the New York-based
World Policy Institute (WPI) issued an analysis Feb. 25 that documents
a fast rise in military contracts given to Halliburton and other US
mega-companies as a result of the US invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.
The report says Washington’s huge military and security budgets
have proven a bonanza for the firms.
The Pentagon budget is $400 billion per year and steadily growing, while
the new Department of Homeland Security is spending around $40 billion
a year. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have cost $180 billion to date.
Halliburton alone received $3.9 billion from the Pentagon in 2003 for
its work in and around Iraq and Afghanistan.
“These are lucrative times to be a military contractor,” said
WPI’s Michelle Ciarrocca.
“Just as their government counterparts do, these companies need
to be held to clear, enforceable standards of conduct,” said her
group’s report.
“If they are allowed to function in an ethical never-never land,
where cost is no object and no one is monitoring the quality of the
goods and services they are providing, problems can multiply exponentially.”
William D. Hartung, co-author of the WPI’s new analysis, said the
biggest beneficiary to date of the Bush administration’s “war
without end” approach to fighting terrorism has been Halliburton.
Hartung, who authored a book on war profiteering in the Bush era entitled
How Much Are You Making on the War, Daddy? A Quick and Dirty Guide to
War Profiteering in the Bush Administration, says Halliburton faces
a huge ethical problem.
The San Francisco-based engineering giant’s Iraq contracts have
drawn fire on several fronts.
The company allegedly overcharged the US government one dollar per gallon
for gasoline purchased from Kuwait, and its employees have been accused
of receiving some $6.3 million in kickbacks on another Kuwaiti contract
by charging for three times as many meals as were actually served at
a major army facility.
“In short, Halliburton is a desperate firm with a history of shaky
ethical practices that is being allowed to take US taxpayers for a ride
in large part because of its cosy relationship with the army and its
powerful friend in the White House, Vice President Cheney,” Hartung
said in a statement.
During a Senate oversight hearing on Iraq reconstruction, Stephen Ellis
from Taxpayers for Common Sense warned that Halliburton’s malpractices
might signal more serious mishandling of funds.
“We believe this may only be the proverbial tip of the waste iceberg,”
he said in his testimony Feb. 13.
The company is fighting back with a salvo of TV commercials featuring
Halliburton Chief Executive Officer Dave Lesar, who lists the services
the company performs for US “servicemen,” and claims Halliburton
is working in Iraq and Afghanistan “because of what we know, not
who we know.”
In a statement Feb. 25, the campaigning groups said they want the White
House and Congress to participate in a bipartisan committee that would
have the power to subpoena the concerned parties and conduct a far-ranging
probe into the contracting process.
The groups said they also want to see an end to the “cost-plus”
contracts used in Iraq reconstruction — legal commitments that
guarantee a contractor a certain profit for a job.
This type of contract must end because the contracting side, the US
government for example, takes all of the risk while the contractor takes
none.
The WPI report quotes former Halliburton purchasing officer, Henry Bunting,
saying recently that the company’s motto for its work in Iraq appears
to be “don’t worry about it, it’s cost-plus.”
Hartung argues that the Pentagon is so dependent on companies like Halliburton
that to cut them out of contracts instantly would damage US interests.
Instead, he argues, “What we need is a ‘policy audit’
of the relationship between the Pentagon and private contractors like
Boeing and Halliburton.”
“Otherwise, they will continue to overcharge and under-perform,”
he said.
Lawmakers alarmed by RFID spying
By Mark Baard
Feb. 26— Lawmakers in several states this week are preparing
rules to prevent Wal-Mart and other companies from using radio-frequency
identification (RFID) tags to spy on their customers.
In statehouses in Utah and California, and at the Federal Reserve Bank
of Boston, legislators and regulators discussed how retailers and government
spies might use the data gathered from RFID tags to monitor consumers.
Utah’s House of Representatives passed the first-ever RFID privacy
bill this week, 47-23. Utah state Rep. David Hogue said that without
laws to ensure consumer privacy, retailers will be tempted to match
the data gathered by RFID readers with consumers’ personal information.
“The RFID industry will carry the technology as far as they can,”
said Hogue, sponsor of the Radio Frequency Identification Right to Know
Act. “Marketing people especially are going to love this kind of
stuff.” Utah’s Right to Know Act is based on federal legislation
drafted by the consumer privacy group Consumers Against Supermarket
Privacy Invasion and Numbering, or CASPIAN. It requires all goods bearing
functioning RFID tags in stores to be labeled as such.
The bill will take effect May 5, 2005, if it is approved by the Utah
state Senate and Utah Gov. Olene S. Walker. California state Sen. Debra
Bowen also introduced a bill intended to keep the data from RFID tags
separate from consumers’ personal information. And officials at
the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston this week met with consumer advocates
to learn how the information gathered from RFID tags might be used to
monitor shoppers’ movements and buying behavior. By matching an
RFID tag’s unique electronic product code to a customer’s
loyalty card or credit card, a retailer could track a shopper’s
movements, and tailor its marketing pitches to whatever the customer
is wearing or to the items in his or her cart.
CASPIAN director Katherine Albrecht also warned officials at the Federal
Reserve that spies may want to track citizens with ubiquitous RFID readers
embedded in public spaces. The readers could recognize tags that have
been hidden inside shoes and other garments by manufacturers, she said.
Some lawmakers now say that RFID tags in retail items may further erode
consumers’ privacy. “There is clearly an upside for the industry,”
said Massachusetts state Sen. Jarrett Barrios, “but underlying
that is a burden borne by the consumers. It’s unnerving to me that
the companies have no incentive to protect consumer privacy.”
Barrios, who sponsored an aggressive antispam bill that passed the Massachusetts
Senate last year, said he is concerned by any technology that threatens
consumers’ privacy. “And if the past is any indication,”
he said, “it will again [in the case of RFID tags] be up to legislators
to protect consumers’ personal information.”
Wal-Mart, Procter & Gamble, and Gillette want to use RFID tags to
track every bottle of shampoo or packet of razor blades from the factory
floor to the store shelf. RFID readers on so-called smart shelves in
Wal-Mart will tally the shelves’ contents continually, and make
more-precise requests for inventory from the retailer’s suppliers.
Retailers will have fewer empty shelves, and suppliers will eliminate
wasteful overproduction of their goods, say proponents of RFID. But
shoppers are wary of RFID tags since Wal-Mart was caught secretly experimenting
with the tags in its stores in Brockton, Massachusetts, and Broken Arrow,
Oklahoma, last year. “Some companies naively thought that privacy
would not be an issue for consumers,” said Mark Roberti, editor
of RFID Journal, an RFID trade publication.
None of the retail tests of RFID tags invaded the privacy of shoppers
in the Wal-Mart stores, Roberti said. He also said that RFID chips in
building security passes and toll-booth tags have never been used to
invade a citizen’s privacy.
EPCglobal, which sets the technology standards for RFID tags in retail
and in the supply chain, is promoting its own privacy policy and appointing
a full-time policy executive to oversee privacy issues. But privacy
advocates do not trust retailers and suppliers to police themselves.
RFID technology is a surveillance tool that clearly can be misused,
said Barry Steinhardt, director of the Technology and Liberty Program
at the American Civil Liberties Union. “To protect consumers, we
need laws, not unenforceable policies,” he said.
Source: Wired.com
US soldiers accused of raping 100 colleagues
By Julian Borger
Washington, DC, Feb. 27— The Pentagon has ordered an urgent
inquiry into reports that more than 100 American women deployed in Iraq
and Afghanistan have been raped or sexually assaulted by fellow soldiers,
it emerged Feb. 26.
There have been 112 cases of sexual assault on women soldiers in units
under central command, which oversees operations in the Middle East
and central Asia, during the past 18 months. Meanwhile, more than 20
women at an air force training base in Texas have told a local crisis
center they were assaulted in 2002.
Even if only half of the cases are confirmed, it will be the worst rape
scandal the US military has faced in nearly a decade.
The reports provoked outrage in the Senate Feb. 26.
“What does it say about us as a people, as the nation, as the foremost
military in the world, when our women soldiers sometimes have more to
fear from their fellow soldiers than from the enemy?” asked Susan
Collins, a Republican senator.
“Why is there less public outrage when servicewomen suffer at the
hands of their own fellow servicemen than from the enemy?”
Senators said it was particularly shocking that many of the victims
had been military police officers and helicopter pilots who had been
assaulted in remote parts of the Afghan and Iraqi battlefields.
The extent of the problem has emerged has over the past few months with
a series of reports in the Denver Post newspaper about servicewomen
who had sought help from civilian counseling centers after returning
from the front, where they had not been offered help by officers. Most
said they feared retaliation, damage to their careers, or being portrayed
as disloyal.
In response, military officials said the defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld,
had launched an inquiry this month into the apparent epidemic of assaults,
and the response of the military.
“The principal focus of that review is how we care for the victim,”
David Chu, the head of the Pentagon personnel department, told the Senate.
“How do we care for the individual who has been harmed?”
Senator Ben Nelson questioned the military’s response to the reports.
“These are all appropriate responses to get an accurate assessment
of the scope of the problem,” he said.
“But I’m concerned, because I don’t feel a sense of outrage
by military leadership, not at this point, at least.”
General George Casey, the vice-chief of staff of the army, admitted
the victims had not been properly treated. “I will tell you frankly
here that our preliminary review of this area in victim assistance leads
me to believe that we have some more work to do in this area,”
Gen Casey said.
“These reports raise many questions about how the services currently
respond to incidents involving allegations of rape and sexual assault,
and just as importantly, how the victims of such attacks are treated.”
According to the Miles Foundation, a charity offering help to victims
of abuse in the military, three-quarters of women veterans who were
raped said they had not reported the assault to a senior officer.
“One-third didn’t know how to, and one-fifth believed that
rape was to be expected in the military,” the foundation says on
its website.
The Pentagon released a report this week on the results of a 2002 survey
suggesting the number of servicewomen who said they had been sexually
assaulted had fallen to 3 percent from 6 percent in 1995. But the survey
did not cover the build-up to the Iraq war, and failed to impress the
Senate.
“Why in the world did it take two years to take a survey?”
John Warner, the Republican head of the armed services committee, asked.
Source: Guardian (UK)
Pentagon hardliner resigns from post
Perle steps down to protect Bush
By Julian Borger
Washington, DC, Feb. 27— Richard Perle, the hawkish Pentagon
adviser who was one of the most fervent advocates for the invasion of
Iraq, has resigned, it emerged yesterday.
Perle’s resignation last week after 17 years at the Defense Policy
Board, an advisory group, was not announced officially but was confirmed
by the Pentagon and Perle yesterday after a copy of his resignation
letter was leaked overnight.
In that letter, dated February 18, Perle said he had decided to leave
the board so that his views would not be attributed to George Bush or
the defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, in an election year.
The veteran strategist - who was known as the Prince of Darkness for
his hardline views while assistant secretary of defense under Ronald
Reagan - had been under scrutiny for his business activities and his
close links to the Iraqi politician, Ahmad Chalabi, who was responsible
for much of the questionable intelligence on Iraq passed to Washington
before the war.
Perle is reportedly being investigated for $3m (£1.6m) in undeclared
bonuses he received from an investment firm, Hollinger International.
Some of Hollinger’s investments went to his own company, Trireme.
Boeing was also found to have invested $20m in Trireme, not long before
Perle advocated a Pentagon scheme for leasing Boeing fuel tankers to
support the Iraq war. He has denied any conflict of interest.
Perle did not return calls yesterday, but his office said his sudden
resignation was “absolutely not” connected to his business
affairs.
He has also come under pressure for his staunch support of Chalabi,
the leader of the Iraqi National Congress. According to one administration
source, President Bush is “furious” at Chalabi’s nonchalance
at allegations that prewar intelligence on Iraqi weapons, much of it
supplied by his organization, was groundless.
Perle helped introduce Chalabi to senior members of Congress and Bush
administration officials, in an effort to lobby for military action
against Saddam Hussein. Last week he told the Christian Science Monitor:
“The CIA has been engaged in a character assassination of Ahmad
Chalabi for years now, and it is a disgrace.”
He also denied that he was being investigated for leaking the name of
Valerie Plame, a CIA agent whose husband, Joe Wilson, had questioned
the US case for war: “I have not been questioned about it, and
I wish whoever is putting this out would cease and desist.”
He apparently did not tell the newspaper he had resigned from his post.
In his letter to Rumsfeld, he said he was stepping down because he did
not want his political views “to be attributed to you or the president
at any time, and especially not during a presidential campaign.”
In a new book, An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror, written
with a former Bush speechwriter, David Frum, Perle called for fundamental
reform of the state department and the CIA.
“Many of the ideas in that book are controversial and I wish to
be free to argue them without those views or my arguments getting caught
up in the campaign,” Perle wrote in his resignation letter.
Bryan Whitman, a spokesman for Rumsfeld said: “The secretary thanked
him for his many years of service under both Democratic and Republican
administrations, and for his energy and intellect.”
Source: Guardian (UK)
Church reveals 4,400 US priests were
accused
of child sex abuse
By Rupert Cornwell
Washington, DC, Feb. 28— Two church reports Feb. 27 painted
an even more shocking picture of child sexual abuse by Roman Catholic
clergy than previously imagined, stating that the scandal at its worst
involved 10 percent of all priests ordained in the year 1970.
Both studies were commissioned by US Conference of Catholic Bishops.
The first, ordered when the scandal erupted in 2002, found that over
the previous half century 4,392 priests -- 4 percent of those practicing
the ministry over the period -- had been accused of sexual abuse. “These
leadership failings have been shameful to the church,” the panel
said.
The average age of the victims was 12. In many cases they were lured
into sexual contact by alcohol or drugs. In four out of five cases the
abuse, most often in the priest’s home, was homosexual. The report
said it was unclear whether that was because the number of homosexual
priests grew, or because they had easier access to boys than to girls.
More than half of all offenders were accused in just once instance,
while just 149 priests -- just over 3 percent of the total -- accounted
for 27 percent of offences.
The 145-page study, its cover in the color purple to signify atonement,
was written by academics at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice
in New York, who sent out questionnaires to every diocese and Catholic
religious order in the US; 97 percent replied.
The fault, the report’s authors concluded, did not lie in Catholic
doctrine, but a lack of proper screening for seminarians entering the
priesthood, and the outward indifference of bishops and other church
leaders, once it was clear that sexual abuse was relatively common.
Victims’ advocates immediately decried the figures. “Thousands
of victims haven’t reported and dozens of bishops aren’t telling
all they know,” said David Clohessy, of the Survivors Network of
those Abused by Priests.
Over the years, according to the John Jay study, only 14 per cent of
priests accused of abuse were reported to police, most in the 1990s.
In the archdiocese of Boston alone, where the scandal broke in 2002,
seven percent of all priests ordained since 1950 were accused of abuse.
In total the archdiocese spent $120million to settle related lawsuits.
Among those interviewed for the second report, on the deeper reasons
for the crisis, was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, in charge of the Vatican’s
Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. As the crisis broke in the
US, he claimed that only one percent of Catholic priests were involved.
The true figure, it now transpires, was almost four times higher.
Source: Independent (UK)
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