- WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- Many
of the U.S. firms doing billions of dollars of work in Iraq and Afghanistan
have been big donors to President Bush and his Republican Party and fill
their boards with political and military heavyweights, a report on Thursday
said.
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- The report by the watchdog group, the Center for Public
Integrity, said most of the 70 firms and individuals getting up to $8 billion
in contracts for post-war Iraq and Afghanistan donated more to Bush's presidential
campaign -- a little over $500,000 -- than any other candidate in the past
decade.
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- "There is a stench of political favoritism and cronyism
surrounding the contracting process in both Iraq and Afghanistan,"
said Charles Lewis, executive director of the group, which investigates
public service and ethics issues.
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- The report said 60 percent of the firms with contracts
had employees or board members who served in previous administrations,
for members of Congress and at the highest level of the military.
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- Winning companies were major political players overall
and the group traced about $49 million in donations since 1990 from these
companies to political parties, committees and candidates. The Republican
Party committee got $12.7 million while Democrats got $7.1 million.
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- The report found that 14 of the 70 contractors got work
both in Iraq and Afghanistan and that combined these companies gave nearly
$23 million in political contributions and 13 of those firms employed former
government officials with close ties to agencies and departments.
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- GOVERNMENT DEFENDS CONTRACTING
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- One of the biggest contracts for Iraq went to Halliburton
Co., the oil services firm once run by Vice President Dick Cheney, who
strongly denies any cronyism.
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- Engineering firm Bechtel, which has more than $1 billion
in U.S. government business in Iraq, has former Secretary of State George
Shultz as a member of its board.
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- The main government departments giving out work in Iraq,
the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the U.S. Agency for International
Development, strongly deny favoritism.
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- USAID spokeswoman Ellen Yount defended the contracting
process at her agency as fair and transparent and said most decisions were
made by non-political career officers.
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- "We have made sure that it is not politically motivated,"
she told Reuters.
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- The contracting process in Iraq has come under strong
scrutiny and criticism, especially from Democratic lawmakers who say Halliburton,
in particular, is getting too much business from the war.
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- Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root has clocked
up more than $3.5 billion in business in Iraq, according to figures given
to Reuters by the Army Corps of Engineers, with $1.6 billion under a no-competition
oil sector repair contract in March and the remainder via another contract
given to the company to provide logistical support to U.S. troops.
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- Two new contracts to replace the March one were set to
have been announced this month, but the Army Corps of Engineers has delayed
those until the end of the year and doubled the total contract amounts
to $2 billion.
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- In one instance, the report said the husband of a senior
Pentagon official was given sub-contracting work in Iraq.
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- A spokesman for Carol Haave, deputy assistant secretary
of defense for security and information operations, told Reuters Haave
had divested from her husband's company and did not see the work in Iraq
as a conflict of interest.
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- The General Accounting Office, the investigative arm
of Congress, is doing a broad investigation into the process used to award
contracts to rebuild Iraq and is expected to release a preliminary report
in the next few months.
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- http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=reutersEdge&storyID=3726976
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