“Guardsmen Took ‘Rent’ From Iraqi Businesses,” headlines today’s LAT.


“California Army National Guard troops sought unauthorized, off-the-books ‘rent’ from Iraqi-owned businesses inside Baghdad’s Green Zone to raise money for a ‘soldiers fund’,” says the military about its wide-ranging investigation into the Modesto battalion.


But, let’s face it, “the war on Iraq is ‘largely a matter of loot,’ as Kasper Gutman so aptly described the Crusades in that seminal treatise on human nature, The Maltese Falcon,” reflects Chris Floyd at his blog, Empire Burlesque.


And, what the Guardsmen took is chump change compared to what Halliburton has ripped off via the war:

Yes, it’s once more into the breach with Halliburton, the gargantuan government contractor that still pays Cheney, its former CEO, enormous annual sums in “deferred compensation” and stock options – even while, as “the most powerful vice president in American history,” he presides over a White House war council that has steered more than $10 billion in no-bid Iraqi war contracts back to his corporate paymaster. This is rainmaking of monsoon proportions. Indeed, the company’s military servicing wing announced a second-quarter profit spike of 284 percent last week – a feast of blood and gravy that will send Cheney’s stock options soaring into the stratosphere.


The bastards at Halliburton had the fucking nerve to order employees “to serve spoiled and rotten food to soldiers – day in and day out.” MORE BELOW:
Chris Floyd’s litany of Halliburton thievery continues:

One tale is particularly instructive: Halliburton’s strenuous efforts to prevent a company hired by the Iraqis, Lloyd-Owen International, from delivering gasoline into the conquered land from Kuwait for 18 cents a gallon. Why? Because LOI’s cost-efficient operation undercuts Halliburton’s highway-robbery price of $1.30 a gallon for the exact same service.


But how is Halliburton able to interfere with the sacred process of free enterprise? Well, it seems that Cheney’s firm, a private company, has control over the U.S. military checkpoint on the volatile Iraq-Kuwait border, and also has the authority to grant – or withhold – the Pentagon ID cards that are indispensable for contractors operating in Iraq. (Even contractors who, like LOI, are working for the supposedly sovereign Iraqi government.) Halliburton used these powers to block LOI’s access to the military crossing – which provides quick, safe delivery of the fuel – for months. Then the game got rougher.


In June, Cheney’s boys blackmailed LOI into delivering some construction materials to a Halliburton project in the friendly confines of Fallujah: no delivery, no “golden ticket” Pentagon card, said Halliburton. They neglected to tell LOI that convoys on the route had been repeatedly hit by insurgents in recent days. And sure enough, LOI’s delivery trucks were ripped to shreds just outside a Halliburton-operated military base: three men were killed and seven wounded. But that’s not all. An email obtained by investigators revealed that Halliburton brass expressly prohibited company employees from offering any assistance to the shattered convoy.


Halliburton extended this milk of human kindness to its food services as well. The firm had to bring in Turkish and Filipino guest workers to feed American soldiers, because the happily liberated Iraqis couldn’t be trusted not to blow up their benefactors. The Cheneymen treated these coolies as befitted their lowly station: they packed them into tents with sand floors and no beds, and literally fed them scraps from the garbage. When the peons complained, Halliburton sacked the subcontractor, who had been buying bargain produce and meat from the locals, and hired an American crony to ship in food all the way from Philadelphia.


U.S. soldiers weren’t treated much better. Employees testified that Halliburton brass ordered them to serve spoiled and rotten food to soldiers – day in and day out. Meanwhile, Halliburton brass were reserving choice cuts for the big beer-soaked barbecues they threw for themselves two or three times a week. They also billed the taxpayer for 10,000 “ghost meals” a day at a single base: the food was phantom, but the rake-off was real. Meanwhile, any employee who made noises about exposing the fraud to auditors was threatened with transfer to a red-hot fire zone, like Fallujah or Saddam’s hometown, Tikrit.


All of this criminal katzenjammer – and much, much more – was authorized at the highest levels, as top procurement brass and Pentagon officials confirmed. Cheney’s office kept tabs on Halliburton’s bids while Pentagon warlord Don Rumsfeld “violated federal law,” the committee noted, by directly intervening in the procurement process to eliminate all possible rivals and make sure Cheney’s employer got the guaranteed-profit gig. Rumsfeld’s office also removed oversight procedures for the dirty deals, and has ignored repeated warnings from Pentagon auditors about Halliburton’s blatant, persistent, pervasive fraud. Instead, the money keeps rolling in: just last month, Don and Dick ladled another $1.75 billion dollop of pork gravy into Halliburton’s bowl. …