Halliburton contract may be probed

From the New York Times via the Houston Chronicle:

Pentagon investigators have referred allegations of abuse in how the Halliburton Co. was awarded a contract for work in Iraq to the Justice Department for possible criminal investigation, a Democratic senator who has been holding unofficial hearings on contract abuses in Iraq said Friday in Washington.

The allegations mainly involve the Army's secret, noncompetitive awarding in 2003 of a multibillion-dollar contract for oilfield repairs in Iraq to Halliburton, a Houston-based company. The objections were raised publicly last year by Bunnatine Greenhouse, then the chief contracts monitor at the Army Corps of Engineers, the government agency that handled the contract and several others in Iraq.

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A referral to the Justice Department by the CIA was exactly how the Plame investigation got started--after some stonewalling, they finally handed it over to Fitzgerald for an independent probe. If we're lucky, this'll go the same way. It's absolutely amazing how so many allegations made by the left only a couple of years ago, universally dismissed by the right and the press at the time, are now being taken seriously by all but the most rabid of White House supporters. The no-bid contracts that the Pentagon handed out to Vice President Cheney's company certainly raised my eyebrow when they were issued; I mean, what a clear cut case of conflict of interest, but conservative friends thought I was full of it: only Halliburton, they said, is capable of doing this work, and only they already have the required security clearances. But a no-bid contract? And surely after a while other companies could be brought up to speed. Of course, we don't yet know if there was any funny business; one can only hope that there is a fair investigation, because it all seems to be pretty fishy.

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