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| UK: Whitehall Warns UK Firms to Stop Sending Workers to Iraq
by Severin Carrell, Tim Webb and Clayton Hirst, The Independent (London)
March 18th, 2004
British businesses hoping to win lucrative deals in Iraq have been told to scrap their plans to travel there because of the escalating violence against Westerners. |
| US: SF Firm Awarded Contract in Iraq
by David R. Baker, San Francisco Chronicle
March 12th, 2004
The Pentagon has begun doling out $5 billion in new contracts to rebuild Iraq, and a San Francisco firm partially owned by Sen. Dianne Feinstein's husband has landed some of the cash. URS Corp. will oversee repairs to Iraq's communications system, hospitals and courthouses under contracts worth a total of $27.7 million.
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| Unearthing Democratic Root to Halliburton Flap
by Al Kamen, Washington Post
March 5th, 2004
Truly there is nothing new under the sun. In recent months Democrats have been bleating about fat Iraq construction contracts going to Halliburton, about Halliburton's ties to the administration because Vice President Cheney happened to run the company just before taking his current job and a shocking GOP tendency to help contributors. |
| Iraq: Pentagon Opens Criminal Inquiry of Halliburton
by Richard A. Oppel Jr., New York Times
February 24th, 2004
Pentagon officials said Monday night that they have opened a criminal fraud investigation of Halliburton, the giant Texas oil-services concern, in an inquiry that will examine "potential overpricing" of fuel taken into Iraq by one of the company's subcontractors. |
| US: American Companies in Iraq Starting from Ground Up
by Joel Brinkley
February 22nd, 2004
When government contractors took on the task of rebuilding Iraq's hospital system last year, they were distressed to learn that nursing staffs no longer existed. Under Saddam Hussein, the contractors discovered, hospitals were forced to fire all their nurses to save money.
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| Iraq: Occupation, Inc.
by Pratap Chatterjee and Herbert Docena, Southern Exposure
February 4th, 2004
Bechtel's projects are examined by freelance journalists. Locals complain of shoddy work, problems with schools, sewage, electricity, gas lines, and low wages. |
| US: Risky Business
by Naomi Klein
January 5th, 2004
This is ReBuilding Iraq 2, a gathering of 400 businesspeople itching to get
a
piece of the Iraqi reconstruction action. They are here to meet the people
doling out the cash, in particular the $18.6 billion in contracts to be
awarded in the next two months to companies from "coalition partner"
countries. The people to meet are from the Coalition Provisional Authority
(CPA), its new Program Management Office, the Army Corps of Engineers, the
US
Agency for International Development, Halliburton, Bechtel and members of
Iraq's interim Governing Council. All these players are on the conference
program, and delegates have been promised that they'll get a chance to
corner
them at regularly scheduled "networking breaks."
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| US: The $87 billion money pit
by Rod Nordland and Michael Hirsh, Newsweek
October 27th, 2003
Iraqis like to point out that after the 1991 war, Saddam restored the badly destroyed electric grid in only three months. Some six months after Bush declared an end to major hostilities, a much more ambitious and costly American effort has yet to get to that point. It is only in recent weeks that the Coalition amped up to the power-generation level that Saddam achieved last March-4,400 megawatts for the country (though it's since dropped back). True, Saddam didn't have a guerrilla war to contend with, and his power infrastructure was in much better shape than the Americans found it. But he also had far fewer resources. |
| Iraq: Some of Army's Civilian Contractors Are No-Shows
by David Wood, Newhouse News Service
July 31st, 2003
U.S. troops in Iraq suffered through months of unnecessarily poor living conditions because some civilian contractors hired by the Army for logistics support failed to show up, Army officers said. |
| US: Now Bush wants to buy the complicity of aid workers
by Naomi Klein, The Guardian
June 24th, 2003
The war on NGOs is being fought on two clear fronts. One buys the silence and complicity of mainstream humanitarian and religious groups by offering lucrative reconstruction contracts. The other marginalises and criminalises more independent-minded NGOs by claiming that their work is a threat to democracy. The US Agency for International Development (USaid) is in charge of handing out the carrots, while the American Enterprise Institute, the most powerful think-tank in Washington, is wielding the sticks. |
| US: Security Issues Delay Rebuilding
by Jackie Spinner, The Washington Post
June 20th, 2003
To get the lights back on and the air conditioning humming again in Iraq, U.S. construction firm Bechtel National Inc. needed a giant tool called a crimper to repair and reconnect high-voltage power lines. But three days after the San Francisco-based company shipped in an 80-pound crimper last month, the $15,000 tool disappeared, stolen in a ripple of looting that has become a major challenge for aid workers and private contractors operating in Iraq. |
| IRAQ: Privatization in Disguise
by Naomi Klein, The Nation
April 18th, 2003
On April 6, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz spelled it out: There will be no role for the United Nations in setting up an interim government in Iraq. The US-run regime will last at least six months, "probably...longer than that." |
| US: Builders Look at Iraq Project as Open Door
by David Streitfeld, Nancy Cleeland and Mark Fineman, The New York Times
March 31st, 2003
When the U.S. Agency for International Development asked the three California companies whether they wanted to bid on a project on the other side of the world, all of them jumped at the chance to write proposals on a tight deadline.
The reason: No one wanted to miss out on the chance to be the first to rebuild Iraq. As the corporate giants well know, the $600 million is merely the initial installment of what promises to be a much bigger sum.
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| US: In Tough Times, a Company Finds Profits in Terror War
by Jeff Gerth and Don Van Natta Jr., New York Times
July 12th, 2002
The Halliburton Company, the Dallas oil services company bedeviled lately by an array of accounting and business issues, is benefiting very directly from the United States efforts to combat terrorism.From building cells for detainees at Guantnamo Bay in Cuba to feeding American troops in Uzbekistan, the Pentagon is increasingly relying on a unit of Halliburton called KBR, sometimes referred to as Kellogg Brown & Root. |
| US: Iraq healthcare system faces $1.6 billion financing gap
by Sunita Kaul, The Daily Star
After 13 years of economic sanctions, the healthcare system in Iraq is in disrepair. A further blow was dealt to it by the damage caused by the looting of hospitals and clinics since the war began and the ongoing disruptions in the delivery of supplies and equipment. |
| US: Bechtel criticized over school project in Iraq
by Larry Kaplow, Palm Beach Post-Cox News Service
President Bush and other U.S. officials tout the repairs to Iraq's schools as a hallmark of an American-led renewal, a symbol of hope for a new generation of Iraqis. But for many in Baghdad, including some U.S. troops involved in the work, Bechtel's school rehabilitation appears slipshod and wasteful. |
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