The Department of Justice is actively covering up massive fraud, into the billions, by Halliburton and its subsidiaries. They are using the regulations of the whistleblower investigation to do this. And the Halliburton connections go deep into the DOJ. For instance, Vinson & Elkins, Halliburton's legal counsel, gave Alberto Gonzales his first job as a lawyer.
There is more. A lot more.
Get out your shovels and follow me past the fold.
This article in Vanity Fair just made me ill. It will make you ill as well. But, READ IT, READ IT!!
The DOJ is using the system that is supposed to protect whistleblowers and give the government time to get in on the suit to shield Halliburton from suits alleging, and proving, fraud. One of the suits, the only one that can be discussed because of the automatic gag order on any suit being considered by the DOJ, is about the illegal use of trucks used for carrying corpses to carry food. But I digress. The mechanism they are using to keep Halliburton safe is this..
False Claims Act, a law crafted by Abraham Lincoln to punish war profiteers. Under the act's "qui tam," or whistle-blowing, provisions, anyone who comes across a suspected fraud can file a suit on taxpayers' behalf. ("Qui tam" is an abbreviation of a Latin phrase that means "He who sues for the king as well as for himself.") If the government—in the shape of the Department of Justice—decides that the case has merit, it "intervenes," adopting the suit as its own and bearing its costs. The original whistle-blower will get a proportion (usually about 18 percent) of the damages, which can be considerable: when qui tam cases succeed, contractors have to pay back three times as much as they stole.
Ah, good you say! We can really get Halliburton now! Oh, but wait..there is a catch.
A suit ordinarily remains sealed for 60 days while the D.O.J. makes up its mind about whether or not to proceed. During this period, anyone who divulged the suit's contents—plaintiff, lawyer, or journalist—would risk prosecution, fines, and imprisonment. According to court precedents, a violation of the seal might also cause the case in question to collapse. But when the seal expires, the lawsuit's contents are made public—whether the D.O.J. intervenes or not.
Sixty days, that's not long, right? Well, that is what is "ordinarily" done. But for Halliburton, they go to extra-ordinary lengths.
So far, Alan Grayson estimates, his efforts to pursue qui tam cases against contractors in Iraq have cost him about $10 million. The severe terms of the False Claims Act mean that he cannot even reveal how many fraud whistle-blowers he represents, but there are dozens. Stuart Bowen is the special inspector general for Iraqi reconstruction (sigir), a unique watchdog whose office reports to both the Pentagon and State Department. He reported last year that his office knew of 79 suppressed qui tam cases, some of which have multiple plaintiffs. As of August, 66 are still under seal. There may be many more. (KBR refuses to say how many qui tam cases have been filed against it.)
The DOJ has qui tam cases still sealed going back to 2003. And because the DOJ keeps going back to court to extend the seals, nothing at all is known about these cases outside the DOJ and the lawyers representing the plaintiffs. The plaintiffs can go to jail for saying ANYTHING including the fact that they have a case pending. One such person is Bud Conyers, who couldn't be interviewed for this article, but his former interview in (gag) Hustler magazine can be quoted. And he gave them a lot of information, most of which will have you all wanting to hang anyone from Halliburton who claims to support the troops. It did that for me!
One of the things Halliburton and its subsidiary, KBR, are responsible for is feeding the troops. And getting the food to the troops. I have to copy/paste the story, I can't type and gag at the same time..they are a bit out of order from the article, but just to make sense of the outtakes, not change anything.
snip...both civilian and U.S.-military regulations state that once a trailer has been used to store corpses it can never again be loaded with food or drink intended for human consumption.
Ok got that?? NEVER AGAIN BE LOADED WITH FOOD OR DRINK.
IF YOU ARE EATING, STOP READING NOW. PLEASE.
The trailer, unit number R-89, had been lying idle for two weeks, Conyers says, in temperatures that daily reached 120 degrees. "Inside, there were 15 human bodies," he recalls. "A lot of liquid stuff had just seeped out. There were body parts on the floor: eyes, fingers. The goo started seeping toward us. Boom! We shut the doors again." The corpses were Iraqis, who had been placed in the truck by a U.S. Army mortuary unit that was operating in the area. That evening, Conyers's colleague Wallace R. Wynia filed an official report: "On account of the heat the bodies were decomposing rapidly.... The inside of the trailer was awful."
Now this truck is not permitted to be used again for food.
But here it is, loaded with ice for the troops, with red stains still on the floor.
But when Bud Conyers next caught sight of trailer R-89, about a month later, it was packed not with human casualties but with bags of ice—ice that was going into drinks served to American troops. He took photographs, showing the ice bags, the trailer number, and the wooden decking, which appeared to be stained red.
We have all heard about Halliburton and KBR's abuses in Iraq, burning trucks instead of repairing them, buying used crap and claiming full new price for them, etc. Now you can hear it, again, from someone who was there and saw it.
They attribute this state of affairs to a chronic shortage of trucks brought about by systemic failures in KBR's operation. The firm had purchased some 200 reefers in Iraq, but only a quarter of them worked. "We had crap-assed trucks they'd bought from local dealers," Logsdon says. "Often you'd be driving one they'd pieced together from several just to get it on the road." He and other former KBR workers say that even new vehicles, some of which cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, often broke down because of an absence of affordable spare parts. Instead of paying to repair them, the company often burned disabled trucks in pits or by the side of the road. Conyers tried repeatedly to draw his superiors' attention to these and other alleged abuses, but to no avail.
Ok, now that you have been suitably horrified, and do go read the article for more details, I go on to the connections in the DOJ with Halliburton. As stated earlier, they gave Alberto Gonzales his first job as a lawyer. I wonder if the following is payback??? Sure looks like it to me.
Qui tam cases from Iraq are investigated by an F.B.I. unit in Rock Island, Illinois. According to Grayson, the unit has a "standing order" to get approval from the attorneys at Vinson & Elkins before questioning anyone at Halliburton or KBR. "F.B.I. agents are not supposed to politely ask permission," he says. "The most common interview technique by the F.B.I. is a knock on your door at nine o'clock at night. They're not allowed to do that when it comes to Halliburton and KBR employees."
So the FBI has to get PERMISSION to interview clients of that law firm?? Anyone else stunned by this???
Please go read the article, it is mind-numbing. I am doing a very narrow focus diary on it, so if anyone else wants to take on the LOGCAP, and sub-contracting regs, etc. PLEASE FEEL FREE!!!