HALIBURTON TO INVESTIGATE RECONSTRUCTION CORRUPTION

Sec. of Defense and former Haliburton executive cut cake celebrating new contract

Washington (WPI) - Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld today named Haliburton subsidiary Kellogg-Brown Corporation as lead agency to investigate widespread fraud and mismanagement of funds in the reconstruction of Iraq.

Just last week a special government report by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction found widespread corruption and misuse of funds throughout Iraq.

Citing numerous incidents of simple theft and multiple examples of horrendous incompetence and mismanagement by low level executives of the Bush reelection campaign committee who had been dispatched to Iraq to handle the trillion dollar reconstruction project the report suggested sweeping changes.

“It is apparent that the managers sent to Iraq had no prior experience in either construction, reconstruction, management, oversight, ethics, local customs and language, auditing, pricing controls, competitive bidding procedures, financial oversight, construction oversight or even how to use Excel for simple ‘household level’ bookkeeping or budgeting.” The report claimed.

In the statement released by Rumsfeld he said, “The Haliburton company has a proven track record of foreign management ‘best-practices.’ We can think of no other organization better qualified to step in and bring spending and management goals into line. Therefore there will not be any other bidders.’

Rumsfeld and the DOD were unavailable for comment following the announcement.