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Tuesday, June 17, 2008

Bad to the bone
Posted by Jill | 7:49 AM
That's the Bush Administration, its privatization of the military, the contractors it uses, the coziness of KBR to Dick Cheney.

It's hard to believe that there are Americans who would begrudge the child of an illegal immigrant an education or health care; or who would send death threats to Graeme Frost's family because he got government-paid health care, but they don't seem to give a rat's ass about this:

The Army official who managed the Pentagon’s largest contract in Iraq says he was ousted from his job when he refused to approve paying more than $1 billion in questionable charges to KBR, the Houston-based company that has provided food, housing and other services to American troops.

The official, Charles M. Smith, was the senior civilian overseeing the multibillion-dollar contract with KBR during the first two years of the war. Speaking out for the first time, Mr. Smith said that he was forced from his job in 2004 after informing KBR officials that the Army would impose escalating financial penalties if they failed to improve their chaotic Iraqi operations.

Army auditors had determined that KBR lacked credible data or records for more than $1 billion in spending, so Mr. Smith refused to sign off on the payments to the company. “They had a gigantic amount of costs they couldn’t justify,” he said in an interview. “Ultimately, the money that was going to KBR was money being taken away from the troops, and I wasn’t going to do that.”

But he was suddenly replaced, he said, and his successors — after taking the unusual step of hiring an outside contractor to consider KBR’s claims — approved most of the payments he had tried to block.

Army officials denied that Mr. Smith had been removed because of the dispute, but confirmed that they had reversed his decision, arguing that blocking the payments to KBR would have eroded basic services to troops. They said that KBR had warned that if it was not paid, it would reduce payments to subcontractors, which in turn would cut back on services.


Um....excuse me? Doesn't that sound like blackmail? Let's read that last sentence again, shall we?

They said that KBR had warned that if it was not paid, it would reduce payments to subcontractors, which in turn would cut back on services.


Yup, that's exactly what it is: KBR gouges the Federal government, then demands payment or else it will cut services it provides to American troops.

And WHO is it that "supports the troops" again?

There just doesn't seem to be any limit to the amount of filth that passes for policy in the Bush years. This is about as reprehensible as anything I've seen from this bunch in the last eight years. Here we have a company, spun off from a company that employed Dick Cheney for years (and presumably to which he's returning after January), that has received a bunch of no-bid, no-accountability contracts from the United States government. It submits a bunch of questionable charges, then demands payment or else it will stop feeding American soldiers.

Doesn't this bother Americans, or are they too busy looking at pictures of Barack Obama's African relatives and telling their friends that he's really a Muslim? Or are they too busy monitoring the health care given to poor children?

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