Regan. Don Regan? Your buddy needs some spelling lessons.
I used to get crap from an obsessive Bush hater through email a couple of times a week. My email program has a little button next to the sender's address that says "block sender". Haven't heard from him in months :D
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But in fact, investigators from the General Accounting Office (GAO) found Halliburton's no-bid contracts to be legal and probably justified by the Pentagon's wartime needs.
The head of the GAO told a House watchdog committee that it had looked into no-bid contracts in Iraq, including Halliburton's, and concluded that the Pentagon and other agencies "generally complied with applicable laws and regulations governing competition" when awarding them. Comptroller General David Walker faulted the Pentagon for some add-ons to those contracts, called "task orders," that he said were not properly justified in writing prior to the award. But he also said the agencies probably would have been able to formally justify the awards given urgent wartime needs (emphasis added):
Comptroller General David Walker: Importantly, given the war in Iraq, the urgent need for reconstruction efforts, and the latitude allowed by the competition law, these task orders reasonably could have been supported by justifications for other than full and open competition.Preceding Walker's testimony was a formal GAO report to Congress stating, among other things, that the Army Corps of Engineers "properly" awarded a sole-source contract for rebuilding Iraq's oilfields (emphasis added):
GAO Report: For example, the Army Corps of Engineers properly awarded a sole-source contract for rebuilding Iraq's oil infrastructure to the only contractor that was determined to be in a position to provide the services within the required time frame.That contract, of course, went to Halliburton's subsidiary, Kellogg, Brown & Root. So much for critics alleging that the Bush administration showed favortism to Halliburton because Vice President Cheney was once its CEO.
As journalist Byron York has reported, it's not really true that the company got its work without competitive bidding. In the 1990s, the military looked for ways to get outside help handling the logistics associated with foreign interventions. It came up with the U.S. Army Logistics Civil Augmentation Program, or LOGCAP. The program is a multiyear contract for a corporation to be on call to provide whatever services might be needed quickly.
Halliburton won a competitive bidding process for LOGCAP in 2001. So it was natural to turn to it (actually, to its wholly owned subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root) for prewar planning about handling oil fires in Iraq. "To invite other contractors to compete to perform a highly classified requirement that Kellogg Brown & Root was already under a competitively awarded contract to perform would have been a wasteful duplication of effort," the Army Corps of Engineers commander has written.
Then, in February 2003, the Corps of Engineers gave Halliburton a temporary no-bid contract to implement its classified oil-fire plan. The thinking was it would be absurd to undertake the drawn-out contracting process on the verge of war. If the administration had done that and there had been catastrophic fires, it would now be considered evidence of insufficient postwar planning. And Halliburton was an obvious choice, since it put out 350 oil-well fires in Kuwait after the first Gulf War.
The Clinton administration made the same calculation in its own dealings with Halliburton. The company had won the LOGCAP in 1992, then lost it in 1997. The Clinton administration nonetheless awarded a no-bid contract to Halliburton to continue its work in the Balkans supporting the U.S. peacekeeping mission there because it made little sense to change midstream. According to Byron York, Al Gore's reinventing-government panel even singled out Halliburton for praise for its military logistics work.
So, did Clinton and Gore involve the United States in the Balkans to benefit Halliburton? That charge makes as much sense as the one that Democrats are hurling at Bush now. Would that they directed more of their outrage at the people in Iraq who want to sabotage the country's oil infrastructure, rather than at the U.S. corporation charged with helping repair it.
Every time I get a chance to challenge a Lib, my Wife kicks me under the table. Libs in my family are already scared to get me started.
The Bush haters come into my office every day. I don't have time to answer this screed because I am still laughing at the guy who told us today that Bush is keeping places like Gitmo open for the cheap labor.
The Bush agenda is Gulag!!!
(I am not making this up, this happened this morning and the guy actually said Gulag!?!)