Halliburton Picked to help clean up New Orleans

From the Houston Chronicle ....

The Navy has hired Houston-based Halliburton Co. to restore electric power, repair roofs and remove debris at three naval facilities in Mississippi damaged by Hurricane Katrina.

Halliburton subsidiary KBR will also perform damage assessments at other naval installations in New Orleans as soon as it is safe to do so.

KBR was assigned the work under a "construction capabilities" contract awarded in 2004 after a competitive bidding process. The company is not involved in the Army Corps of Engineers' effort to repair New Orleans' levees.

For those of you who have short term memories .... check out these other nuggets of information about KBR ..

Former KBR Worker Admits to Fraud in Iraq

Reuters is reporting that US authorities have indicted an ex-employee of Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown & Root for defrauding the government of $3.5 million

Halliburton Watch .... get all of your info here about the goings on with KBR and Halliburton

And one more for the road: ( from CBS News )

Halliburton's public face is feeding the troops and trucking supplies through dangerous desert.

But waste and theft are silent players in Halliburton's Iraq operations, according to two men who drove supply trucks for Halliburton subsidiary KBR, reports CBS News Correspondent Sharyl Attkisson.

Halliburton said Friday it may sell or spin off its troubled KBR subsidiary.
KBR has a multi-billion dollar contract to supply U.S. troops in Iraq, but is accused of hundreds of millions of dollars in improper charges.

Former KBR truckers David Wilson and James Warren say Americans paying Halliburton's $7 billion tab were getting taken for a ride.

There was no basic plan, they say, to maintain all the supply trucks. So even in oil-rich Iraq, "you couldn't get parts or oil or filters for oil changes," said Wilson, a former KBR convoy commander.

That meant $85,000 trucks got ditched in the desert.

"A lot of times trucks were left on the side of the road because of something as simple as a flat tire or a bad filter," Wilson said.

Theft was a problem, too. Supplies were poorly strapped onto flatbeds in open view -- a free-for-all for looters who stole off the trucks as they drove through town.

And in Army camps, they say some soldiers and Halliburton employees helped themselves.

"We'd be in our trucks asleep at night and people would be on top of our trailer going thru our stuff," said former Halliburton truck driver James Warren.

"It was like rats on cheese," Wilson added.

There may be no way to know how much was lost and stolen. Incredibly, Warren says there were no manifests listing what was on the trucks to begin with.

"There was no accounting for what was shipped and what was actually delivered," he said.

Warren and Wilson recently told their stories to Congress after Halliburton/KBR fired them for allegedly running Iraqi civilians off the road -- something they claim their supervisors repeatedly instructed them to do to protect the convoys.

Nobody from Halliburton would be interviewed, but the company has said it "questions the factual nature" of many assertions from ex-employees, and criticisms are politically motivated. Vice President Dick Cheney used to run Halliburton.

Halliburton makes up to two percent profit over costs -- a "cost-plus" arrangement that critics say leaves little incentive to save: the more taxpayer dollars Halliburton spends; the more Halliburton makes.