Search

As more and more revelations about contract abuse in Iraq by Halliburton come out regularly, activists in Houston are working with national groups, including Democracy Rising, to highlight corporate contract abuse by Halliburton when they hold their shareholders meeting this May 18.

Sudan on Tuesday said its ABCO corporation -- in which Swiss company Cliveden owns 37 percent -- had begun drilling for oil in Darfur, where preliminary studies showed there were "abundant" quantities of oil. "The Sudanese people have never benefited from these (oil) discoveries," said Ahmed Hussein, the London-based spokesman for the Justice and Equality Movement. "The oil must wait until a final peace deal is signed."

An Australian man shot dead in Baghdad was well aware of the risks of working as a private security guard in Iraq, all of whom carry a $50,000 bounty on their heads, his stepmother said yesterday.

The victims of apparent insurgent ground fire include six American security guards, and another is killed in a bomb attack.

Six US citizens, employed by the Blackwater Security Consulting firm, and two Filippino guards were among 11 killed when a Bulgarian commercial helicopter was shot down north of Baghdad. The deaths of at least 13 foreign security contractors in two days is the latest blow to Iraq's private security sector, which the interior ministry estimates employs 50,000 foreigners and Iraqis.

Six Blackwater Security Consulting guards responsible for protecting U.S. diplomats were killed Thursday when their helicopter was shot down as it headed from Baghdad to Tikrit for a security detail, said company spokesman Chris Bertelli.

Longtime U.S. involvement in Colombia may be transforming and expanding from a "war on drugs" into a Washington-led, oil-company fueled destabilization campaign against Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.

With more hired guns in Iraq than in any other U.S. conflict since the 1991 Persian Gulf War, armed contractors admit their role is cloudy and controversial. They're driven by money and a lust for life on the edge, but also by a self-styled altruism. They do shoot to kill, but they aren't legally considered combatants.

A controversial British firm, Aegis Defence Services Ltd., responsible for a sweeping $293 million contract in Iraq could not prove that employees received proper weapons training or that it had vetted Iraqi employees to ensure they did not pose a threat, according to a government audit.

Demand for private security services are expected to skyrocket in the wake of the mounting unrest in Thailand's three southernmost provinces and the recent bombings in Hat Yai.

Appearing in federal court, David B. Chalmers Jr., head of Houston-based BayOil (USA), and his business associate Ludmil Dionissiev pleaded innocent to charges they fixed oil prices and paid illegal surcharges as part of a scheme to ingratiate themselves with Saddam Hussein's regime and thereby profit from Iraqi oil sales.

Fittingly, a government devoted to perpetual pre-emptive deconstruction now has a standing office of perpetual pre-emptive reconstruction. Gone are the days of waiting for wars to break out and drawing up plans to pick up the pieces. The White House now has an office that keeps "high risk" countries on a "watch list" and assembles teams made up of private companies, NGOs and members of thinktanks - some will have "pre-completed" contracts to rebuild countries that are not yet broken.

Billing disputes with contractors in Iraq have sparked major questions about Pentagon reforms of the 1990s that streamlined acquisition programs but also cut down on oversight of performance and billing.

While the Iraqi army seems to be getting up to speed, the training of the 142,000-member police force is moving more slowly and fraught with bigger problems than reports by U.S. officials might suggest. The eventual goal is to have Iraqis training all of their security forces, but private contractors expect to continue working well into 2006. One small but revealing reason says one trainer: students suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. "They are the main targets of insurgents," he says. "It makes it difficult to maintain their attention span."

The U.S. Government has defended its decision to award a £293 million Iraq Security contract to British mercenary Tim Spicer, in reponse to concerns raised by the family of Belfast man Peter McBride, who was shot dead by Scots Guards soldiers under Spicer's command in 1992.

In a city that has been rocked by the Enron collapse and subsequent prosecutions, the indictment of Houston oil executive David Chalmers Jr. and a Houston-based Bulgarian oil trader serves notice that the probe of irregularities in the U.N.-supervised oil-for-food program will likely ensnare more energy industry figures before it is finished.

Many of the 800 U.S. military advisors in Colombia are assigned to Arauca where California-based Occidental Petroleum in a joint partnership with the Colombia state company Ecopetrol runs the main oilfield. Occidental lobbied heavily for this project, which marks a departure from the erstwhile U.S. policy of only assisting ostensible narcotics enforcement operations in Colombia.

Private contractors in Iraq say pay can top $100,000 for a year's work. But plenty of danger is often part of the bargain. Frank Atkins, who returned home in October, said danger was part of his job as a police adviser. Sometimes, the former Marine enjoyed the thrill of fighting off insurgent attacks alongside U.S. military personnel on his convoys.