GAO my!

I would hope that we would be just as shocked and appalled by Halliburton's screwing of US taxpayers even if they had no link to Dick Cheney. At this point I just cannot be sure.

Here comes the Washington Post:

Mike West arrived in Iraq last September as a labor supervisor, one of legions of workers hired by oil services giant Halliburton Co. to help rebuild the battered country. And at his boss's direction, West filled out timecards saying that he worked 12-hour days, seven days a week, in camps with evocative names such as Anaconda and Al Asad.

But over the next two months, West said yesterday, he probably put in no more than a week's worth of labor. The rest of the time, West and others hired by the company loafed, read books and grew frustrated about the lack of work, he said.

When he complained about the apparent waste, West said, he was told not to worry about costs: Halliburton would make a profit no matter what happened. "I really saw no purpose for us being there," West said. "I don't know why Halliburton was hiring all these people."

West is among six contract workers who recently told members of the House Committee on Government Reform they witnessed examples of misspending and mismanagement by Halliburton subsidiary KBR while serving overseas. They described how $85,000 trucks had been abandoned on roadsides in Iraq for minor problems, such as flat tires, or driven into the ground because of a lack of basic maintenance. A woman hired to oversee Halliburton subcontracts said the company paid almost $1 million against the Army's wishes to house 100 employees at a hotel in Kuwait over a three-month period, a cost that was passed on to the government.

The debate in the articles title refers to the fact that these claims are still being fact checked, not that there is evidence to the contrary, which I took as the initial implication. Maybe I am now too sensitive to these things.

But there is more to ruffle my feathers at the end of the article:

Separately, a GAO report released yesterday raised questions about some of the work Halliburton did to prepare for the war, but said the contract for restoring the country's oil infrastructure "generally complied with applicable legal standards."

What the hell does that mean. "Generally complied?" Someone help me out.

The handing out of some early no-competition work to rebuild Iraq was flawed and U.S. government agencies failed in several instances to comply with procurement laws, said a new government report on Monday.

The General Accounting Office said while agencies generally complied with applicable laws, the Bush administration violated requirements when it issued some "task orders" for work in Iraq under contracts the government already had with companies.

Awesome. More violations from the Bush Administration. More failure to comply with laws. You have to love their consistancy, though. They pick a course and sure stick with it.