Originally posted by Capt_Fantastic
No OIL problems....
Because that would make it too obvious...If the price of oil dropped like a rock, they would have no ground to stand on....
however, the price of gas continues to rise...because the oil companies, that put Bush in power, are making huge...fuc.king! HUGE...profits off the price hikes...
Hurricanes my ass!
mmmhhhmm, did you ever hear of Haliburton feceman??
^Are we referring to the war profiteering Halliburton?
Originally posted by SpelljammerThe Guardian is a "liberal" newspaper, you twit.
Huzzah! SpellJammer told you we couldn't leave Iraq even if we wanted to! And here's why!
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1590979,00.htmlSo if we leave Iraq, Al-Quaida will get it and will think they're [b]Al
That. 😂 [/B]
Originally posted by Capt_Fantastic
Terribly right...and terribly wrong at the same time....Right, in regards to the fact that the terrorists would have no vaccum to fill...if we hadn't created that vaccum.
Agreed.
Originally posted by Capt_Fantastic
wrong...in that there would be less terrorists there, had we not become involved. They were always there...it's just that they didn't have the opprotunities we provided them.
To my knowledge Al-Qaeda did not have a significant presence in Iraq. There was not many terrorists there to begin with. Saddam opposed fundamental Islamic practises. This war gave Al-Qaeda the opportunity to infiltrate Iraq.
If you are going to invade a country on the basis that there are terrorists hiding there, then I suggest the U.S. could also invade Canada, Britain, France, Spain, Germany as well as itself.
If the U.S. wanted to invade a country that supports a large amount of terrorist activities and is a main financial source for terrorism I suggest they look towards saudi arabia.
lets look at history, as history has shown that most mistakes are repeated.....
America put sadam in power so that he would obey and become an unofficial 2nd America.. what happened? he disagreed and did what he wanted, turned half of iraq against the usa.... George the 1st when in, went all the way to sadams front door... Sadam got back in line, so they left... then sadam disobeyed again... this time america removed him...
Would anyone like to hazard a guess whats going to happen next?
And if the war in Iraq was the right move, would you go over there and fight? Would you want a brother or sister or a mother or father going over there? To fight in place where we shouldnt even be in the 1st place??? To be sent over there to fight for the wrong reasons! "Yes Iraq has WMD, let's invade. Ok. But here's the problem, they dont have any! So now someone you care about is sent over to Iraq and is killed for what?? Nothing. To me that makes me sick. I dont kow how Geroge W. can sleep at night.
Maybe it's true, Bush has only his own selfish agenda to confenscate the oil supply. But SpellJammer has two questions for you..
1) Why Iraq? Iran has nearly 5x the oil supply Iraq does. So either Bush and the entire administration can't count, or it's NOT for oil..
2) Whatever his reasoning. It bennefits America. And isn't that the main thing? We as Americans hold responsibility to ourselves, nobody else. They're just a bunch of barbaric sand-people with thier AK-47s and bombs attatched to thier butts anyway.. Think of the greater good for America..
Originally posted by EsteemedLeader
Stupid liberals, always wanting to leave Iraq. They're just a bunch of quitters...
Originally posted by Hit_and_Miss
lets look at history, as history has shown that most mistakes are repeated.....America put sadam in power so that he would obey and become an unofficial 2nd America.. what happened? he disagreed and did what he wanted, turned half of iraq against the usa.... George the 1st when in, went all the way to sadams front door... Sadam got back in line, so they left... then sadam disobeyed again... this time america removed him...
Would anyone like to hazard a guess whats going to happen next?
Originally posted by xmarksthespot
^Are we referring to the war profiteering Halliburton?
The Guardian is a "liberal" newspaper, you twit.
Originally posted by SpelljammerIran has more than twice the population of Iraq and it's infrastructure hasn't been completely crippled by years of sanctions. Invasion of Iran would result in several fold more civilian casualties than invasion of Iraq. And there's no easily exploitable fraudulent excuse to invade.
Maybe it's true, Bush has only his own selfish agenda to confenscate the oil supply. But SpellJammer has two questions for you..1) Why Iraq? Iran has nearly 5x the oil supply Iraq does. So either Bush and the entire administration can't count, or it's NOT for oil..
Originally posted by Spelljammer^You prove you're not just a moron, you're a racist.
2) Whatever his reasoning. It bennefits America. And isn't that the main thing? We as Americans hold responsibility to ourselves, nobody else. They're just a bunch of barbaric sand-people with thier AK-47s and bombs attatched to thier butts anyway.. Think of the greater good for America..
Originally posted by FeceMan
Thank you for that enlightened comment. Would you care to add to the discussion by elaborating or would you prefer to leave it as-is?
Between The Lines, radio newsmagazine
The revolving door between big business and government is easily illustrated in the Bush White House. Richard Perle, a key architect of the Iraq war, resigned his chairmanship of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board in March after press reports revealed he was acting as a highly paid consultant for companies hoping to profit from conflicts in Iraq and North Korea. And before becoming Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld sat on the board of a Swiss company which had signed a $200 million dollar contract with North Korea in 1999 to design and build components for two light water nuclear reactors there.But the most disturbing example of possible conflicts of interest in the Bush administration are seen in Vice President Dick Cheney's association with Halliburton, an oil services and construction company that regularly does business with the Pentagon. Halliburton, where Cheney served as CEO from 1995 to 2000, was awarded a no-bid contract in March to put out oil fires in postwar Iraq -- and as revealed by the U.S. Army in May -- to operate Iraq's oil fields and distribute its petroleum products. Between The Lines' Scott Harris spoke with Charlie Cray, corporate reform campaigner with Citizen Works, who examines the charges of war profiteering leveled against Halliburton and other companies with close ties to the White House.
Charlie Cray: Well, the Defense Policy Board has 30 members, nine of whom have ties to companies that have won more than $76 billion in defense contracts in 2001 and 2002. Four members are registered lobbyists and one represents two of the three largest defense contractors. You have kind of issues of conflicts of interest. You have larger questions concerning whether or not some of the ostensible basis of our foreign policy is contradicted by the private activities of some of the people involved. For instance, take Vice President Dick Cheney. Dick Cheney was CEO of Halliburton. One of the stories that has not come out except for the good graces, the persistence of Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), is the fact that Halliburton has done business in Iran and during Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq through off-shore subsidiaries. Cheney was confronted about this and at first denied that early on in his vice-presidency or while he was a candidate for office. It was later proven to be t rue and he sort of avoided responsibility for it, I guess, by claiming that this was an activity of a subsidiary and that the company didn't really know much about it. The hypocrisy there is that here's a company that's doing business with regimes that this administration has deemed to be supporters of terrorism.
Between The Lines: Vice President Dick Cheney still gets quite a bit of money every year from Halliburton, a company that has been recently awarded contracts from the U.S. government. Do you want to outline the compensation package that Dick Cheney is still getting and the lucrative contracts that Halliburton is receiving right now?
Charlie Cray: Dick Cheney's relationship with Halliburton's goes back 11 years to when he was secretary of defense under President Bush. And he at that time established a relationship with Halliburton by hiring Kellog, Brown and Root, their subsidiary, to look at how the Defense Department could more efficiently manage some of its operations by inviting private contractors into perform those services. Then he went to work at Halliburton and became the CEO and Halliburton grew to become from something like the 78th largest to the 17th largest defense contractor under Dick Cheney's leadership. And then he of course, came back into government office but it apparently seems like he hasn't lost his connection to Halliburton. He continues to receive almost $200,000 in annual compensation as a retirement package from Halliburton.
Also, a little known story is that the vice president's office met with Halliburton in October along with other representatives of the oil industry to discuss oil production in Iraq after Saddam was gone. This is back in October before any decision of going to war was even officially made. That's a meeting that we don't know a lot about. It was reported on by the Wall Street Journal by Thaddeus Herrick on the 16th of January, and the administration denied it even occurred. Much like they won't cough up the documents from the national energy strategy. There's a lot of secrecy involved in the relationships between this administration and the corporations that they have deep ties with, particularly the oil and gas industry. The administration has about 41 members, top level administration representatives that came out of the oil and gas industry, including people like Condoleeza Rice who once had an oil tanker owned by Chevron named after her.
Between The Lines: Do the connections between Vice President Dick Cheney and Halliburton just have the appearance of impropriety or through your research, do you feel that there is a basis for a congressional investigation of what's going on here?
Charlie Cray: I think there is enough evidence for a congressional investigation into Dick Cheney and Halliburton based on two lines of evidence. One is the story reported in the Wall Street Journal on the 16th of January that the vice president's office met with Halliburton and members of other companies back in October to plan oil production in Iraq. There is evidence that this was a closed-bidding process that excluded companies that had the qualifications to be able to do business there. And why were they shut out? I think that question needs to be answered.
Originally posted by xmarksthespot
^You prove you're not just a moron, you're a racist.
Besides, as said, a man only has duty to himself, God, and his country. You call the Republicans out for wanting to police the world, but your niave "We have to be considerate to everyone!" bullshit is more then likely to police everyone and far worse. You hold no sympathy for some countries other poverty like Isral who's been bullied and raped sense the beggeining of time, or feel bad for the poor South Koreans who have been Jim Kong's *****, but you have the nerve to call SpellJammer a rascist, because he could give a rat's ass about a dictator, and the vicous people he's brainwashed into thinking just like him. They had no oppurtunity to be anything more then putty-men. They were raised that way. And there's nothing you or SpellJammer can do about it. Those people are better off dead. How evil are you to not allow those terrorists to rest in peace, be with Allah, and no longer be a puppet? Have you no heart Mrs. Liberty?
Jason Leopold, freelance journalist
Months before the United States military showered Iraq with bombs and missiles, the Department of Defense was secretly working with Vice President Dick Cheney’s old company, Halliburton Corp., on a deal that would give the world’s second largest oil services company total control over Iraq’s oil fields, according to interviews with Halliburton’s most senior executives.Moreover, classified Halliburton documents obtained over the past month prove that the war in Iraq was as much about controlling the world’s second largest oil reserves as it was about overthrowing the regime of Iraq’s President Saddam Hussein.
The deal between the Department of Defense and Halliburton unit Kellogg, Brown & Root to operate Iraq’s oil industry, which was hatched as early as October 2002, according to the documents, and could ultimately be worth $7 billion, couldn’t have come at a better time for Halliburton.
Back in October of last year, Halliburton was saddled with a multibillion-dollar asbestos liability and the company was also suffering through a slowdown in domestic oil production. Halliburton’s stock price responded swiftly, plummeting to $12.62 in October 2002, from a high of $22 the year before. Rumours began to swirl that the company would be forced to file for bankruptcy.
But news of a pending war in Iraq meant that Halliburton’s financial troubles would, like Saddam Hussein’s regime, be history. Classified documents from November 2002 show that the Department of Defense recommended that The Army Corps of Engineers award a contract to Brown & Root to extinguish Iraqi oil well fires in addition to “assessing the condition of oil-related infrastructure; cleaning up oil spills or other environmental damage at oil facilities; engineering design and repair or reconstruction of damaged infrastructure; assisting in making facilities operational; distribution of petroleum products; and assisting the Iraqis in resuming Iraqi oil company operations.”
“The fact that the Department was planning for the possibility that it would need to repair and provide for continuity of operations of the Iraqi oil infrastructure was classified until March 2003,” the agency said on its web site. “This prevented earlier acknowledgement or announcement of potential requirements to the business community.”
The Army Corps of Engineers has declassified portions of some documents related to its deal with Brown & Root. The deal memo can be viewed at:
http://www.hq.usace.army.mil/cepa/iraq/factsheet.htmSince October, when Halliburton was awarded the contract to repair Iraq’s oil industry, the company’s stock has nearly doubled. On Tuesday, the stock closed at $23.90.
Publicly, when the Army Corps of Engineers was criticized by Washington lawmakers earlier this year for awarding the no-bid contract to Brown & Root because of the company’s strong ties to Cheney, the agency said Brown & Root would do nothing more than extinguish oil well fires. Brown & Root was chosen, according to the Army Corps of Engineers, because Brown & Root could be “deployed” on short notice.
However, according to interviews with Halliburton executives, company employees were working out of a hotel room in Kuwait City as far back as November assessing the Iraq’s oil infrastructure and mapping out plans for operating Iraq’s oil industry.
A report in the magazine Business 2.0 from April 2003 makes this point clear.
“From behind the obsidian mirrors of his wraparound sunglasses, Ray Rodon surveys the vast desert landscape of southern Iraq's Rumailah oilfield. A project manager with Halliburton's engineering and construction division, Kellogg Brown & Root, Rodon has spent months preparing for the daunting task of repairing Iraq's oil industry. Working first at headquarters in Houston and then out of a hotel room in Kuwait City, he has studied the intricacies of the Iraqi national oil company, even reviewing the firm's organizational charts so that Halliburton and the Army can ascertain which Iraqis are reliable technocrats and which are Saddam loyalists,” the story says.
Halliburton, in a March news release, said it first began working on a plan to repair Iraq’s oil infrastructure at the request of the Defense Department.
“The DoD, through its US Army Logistics Civil Augmentation Program (LOGCAP) III contract with KBR, tapped the company in November 2002 to develop the contingency plan. Implementation of the plan is being executed through a separate contract KBR now holds with the US Army Corps of Engineers,” the news release says.
A half-dozen Halliburton employees said that they don’t believe Cheney played any role in the company securing the lucrative contract from the government, but they noted that the Army Corps of Engineers purposely downplayed the company’s role in repairing Iraq’s infrastructure because of Halliburton’s ties to Cheney and the criticism that would likely come from Congressional Democrats who claim the government is playing favorites.
“Halliburton has been working with the United States government since the 1940s,” said one executive who supplied documents and requested anonymity. “But because Vice President Dick Cheney used to run the firm everyone automatically assumes that he had something to do with the government contracts we now get.”
Since 9-11, Halliburton’s Brown & Root division is the only company that has profited from the so-called war on terror.
Based on its performance providing U.S. troops in the Balkans with housing, food, water, mail, laundry, and heavy equipment (a job for which Halliburton has been paid $3 billion so far), the company won an unprecedented ten-year deal in December 2001 to supply similar logistical support to U.S. military operations around the world.
“The Pentagon's Logistics Civil Augmentation Program pays Halliburton through what's called a cost-plus arrangement, meaning that KBR is guaranteed to recover its expenses, plus receive a set profit, provided the contract terms are met. To date, KBR has received $830 million from the program. The company is also helping to run Incirlik Air Base and other U.S. military facilities in Turkey (where an initial contract, set to expire in September, was worth $118 million) and received $65 million to support bases in Afghanistan and Uzbekistan. What's more, it earned $33 million building cells for suspected al Qaeda members at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Overall, Halliburton's backlog of government revenue expanded 40% in the last three months of 2002 alone,” Business 2.0 reported. .
What is most troubling about the sweet deals Brown & Root has been awarded and what has lawmakers like Congressman Henry Waxman, D-California, up in arms is how the company ripped off the government to the tune of $2 million on several occasions while Cheney was chief executive of Halliburton and the company’s long history of supporting terrorist regimes—including Iraq, Iran and Libya—despite U.S. sanctions on such countries.
Last year, KBR agreed to pay the U.S. government $2 million to settle allegations it defrauded the military while Cheney was chief executive of parent company Halliburton. KBR was accused of inflating contract prices for maintenance and repairs at Fort Ord, a now-shuttered military installation near Monterey, Calif. The lawsuit, filed in Sacramento, alleged KBR submitted false claims and made false statements in connection with 224 delivery orders between April 1994 and September 1998.
KBR and Halliburton has also paid out settlements to end investigations and lawsuits on half-a-dozen other occasions.In 1978, a grand jury indicted KBR on charges that it colluded with a competitor on marine construction work. KBR paid a $1 million fine to settle the charges. In 1995, the U.S. fined Halliburton $3.8 million for violating a ban on exports to Libya. Four years later, a Halliburton subsidiary opens an office in Iran, despite a U.S. ban on doing business in that country. In 2001, Halliburton shareholders lashed out at company executives for its pipeline project in Burma, citing that country's human-rights abuses. Also in 2001, watchdog groups blasted Cheney for placing 44 Halliburton subsidiaries in foreign tax havens.
Halliburton's dealings in six countries - Azerbaijan, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Libya and Nigeria - show that the company's willingness to do business where human rights are not respected is a pattern that goes beyond its involvement in Burma..
So how does the company continue to win such lucrative contracts with the government, as in the case of Iraq, in spite of its shady record?
“KBR was selected for the award based on the fact that KBR is the only contractor that could commence implementing the complex contingency plan on extremely short notice,” Halliburton said in a March news release.
Despite Waxman’s criticism of the government awarding the bulk of the work in Iraq to Halliburton unit Brown & Root, it appears that the company’s role in the country is getting bigger by the second. And plans to open up the bidding to other companies appear to be a dead issue.
On Monday, the Army Corps of Engineers said it awarded Brown & Root another $24 million contract, this time to distribute gasoline and cooking fuel in Iraq.
The Army Corps of Engineers said the delivery order was awarded to Halliburton subsidiary on May 4 as part of the $7 billion umbrella contract awarded to the company in March for fire fighting services in Iraq.
The Army Corps last week said the Halliburton subsidiary had received about $75 million in orders so far, and the total amount would likely reach about $600 million, far less than the worst-case figure of $7 billion estimated before the Iraq war.