Helliburton

War is hell:

Democratic legislators stepped up criticism of the Halliburton Company on Monday for what they said was "war profiteering," citing Pentagon audits that question more than $1 billion of the company's bills for work in Iraq.

The estimates of excessive spending and improper billing by Halliburton, a Texas-based company that provides logistical support and oil-field repairs in Iraq, are more than twice as high as those in previous official reports. The findings, including previously unpublicized internal Pentagon studies, were released at a Democrat-sponsored forum that was held, Democratic leaders maintained, because the Bush administration and Congressional Republicans have refused to hold the contractor accountable.

And if you dare to be a whistleblower, well, let's just say that management has many tools at their disposal:

The hearing featured videotaped testimony from a former food manager in Iraq for Kellogg Brown & Root who said the dining hall where he worked in early 2004 charged the Army for 20,000 meals a day when it was only serving 10,000, routinely used expired foods and punished him for speaking to auditors by transferring him to the more dangerous outpost of Falluja.

Tbogg, citing this Houston Chronicle article, has more:

"We were told to go into the trucks and remove the food items and use them after removing the bullets and any shrapnel from the bad food," Mayberry, who is now working in Iraq for another contractor, told the lawmakers in a videotape.

Oh, and don't forget the fuel:

At the start of the war, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had also awarded Halliburton a no-bid contract to restore Iraq's oil infrastructure. Under that contract, Halliburton was ordered to truck much-needed fuel into Iraq, and the assignment mushroomed to a total cost of $2.5 billion.

Under that contract, Waxman said, Halliburton was charging about $1.30 a gallon to truck in fuel from Kuwait. Executives from Lloyd-Owen International, which has been trucking in fuel for the last year, said they have been charging about 18 cents a gallon.

I wonder if they got the same $1.30 a gallon for sailboat fuel?

Yeah, war is hell--for Halliburton, it means having to come up with novel ways to spend all the money they're raking in while not getting too cheered up by all the death and destruction.