WASHINGTON — KBR employees working in Iraq stole weapons, artwork and even gold to make spurs for cowboy boots, former company workers told Senate Democrats today.
Appearing before a Democrats-only panel looking into allegations of contracting abuses in Iraq, the one-time employees accused their co-workers of widespread improper activity.
Linda Warren, a 50-year-old Texas woman who worked as a laundry foreman and recreation director for the Houston-based contracting giant in Iraq, told lawmakers in a prepared statement that her co-workers doing construction in Iraqi palaces and municipal buildings stole wood carvings, tapestries, crystal "and even melted down gold to make spurs for cowboy boots."
Warren told lawmakers she was reprimanded by a supervisor in 2004 for giving water to Iraqi workers laboring in a sweltering laundry building.
"You can take their gold and silver, rip their tapestries off the wall, but I can't give them a drink of water," Warren, in a prepared statement, said she told the supervisor.
Warren said she was reminded that she had signed a confidentiality agreement and then told that an American woman "wouldn't last very long on the streets of Baghdad."
Looting, fraud, rape — it's just Houston business as usual.
To mark the occasion (and to help them overcome the abstinence education prescribed by their elders), we present some of the most important Republican sexual positions that have served their ancestors so well in creating an atmosphere of endless privilege, practiced ignorance, and lifelong irresponsibility.
Missionary Accomplished
Backdoor Recount
Walking the Elephant
Paging Senator Craig
De-Baathification
Reverse Cowboy
Congratulations, Jenna and Henry! Consider this your early wedding present from everyone in Skimbleland!
Natural-gas prices in the U.S. have risen 93% since August as power-hungry nations compete in a global market that scarcely existed five years ago. The trend has profound implications for the troubled U.S. economy.
Natural gas doubles in eight months. Gasoline is approaching four times the price it was when the first Clinton left office. Our all-energy-crony White House is determined to squeeze every last penny from the economy they sought to destroy.
Given the evidence of the economy, Iraq, and New Orleans, I suppose Republicans don't believe in leaving a campground in better shape than you found it.
Choosing just the right look for the wedding party can be such a risky business! I guess the young white Texas Republican chickenhawk theme is the safe choice.
Would it be asking too much to review candidates for the presidency with the objective of excluding those with a tendency to commit to 100 years in Iraq?
The irony is that the absolute peak of American optimism occurred during the years Republicans were actively impeaching President Clinton over a blowjob.
Therefore, fellatio shows positive correlation as an economic stimulus package. With fellatio in the White House, American optimism is firm and vigorous.
What we have learned since then is that White House war crimes and borrowing from China to invade Iraq stimulate only recession, i.e., economic flaccidity caused by Republican MBAs and CEOs.
On the optimistic-pessimistic scale, which would you rather see in the American economy: Democratic vigor or Republican flaccidity?
For super-rich fliers in search of the ultimate status symbol, the big problem isn't plunking down $50 million to $250 million for a new, full-size jetliner from Boeing or Airbus. It's finding someone to turn that plane into a flying palace.
These purveyors of customized interiors, called "completion centers," are increasingly sold out for years to come as demand for transport-size personal aircraft has soared from a handful a year to dozens. That means lots more work designing and installing mother-of-pearl vanities, gilded ceilings, exotic wood cabinets, hand-made carpeting, multihead showers -- even throne rooms and gyms. Some vendors design the china, crystal and sterling silver that travel on board, and a few have installed missile defense systems on the aircraft.
"We have more work than we can handle," says Jon Buccola, chief executive officer of outfitter Greenpoint Technologies Inc. of Kirkland, Wash. Greenpoint, which specializes in interiors on new Boeing 737 business jets, has won $100 million in new business since the start of the year and is talking to a potential client who won't even get his or her new aircraft until 2014, he says.
"An increasing number of wealthy individuals and heads of state are buying commercial-sized planes and are spending even more to have them customized with everything from master suites to gymnasiums." And did you take note of the private missile defense systems?
The only growth area in the American economy is the enhancement of stratospheric status symbols — the equivalent of shoe polish for plutocrats.
In its creation of a stateless über-wealthy parallel universe, the pluto-Republican view of the economy is not a chicken in every pot. It's a gym in every jet. And woe to all of you who have no jet.
Just as recent books like Jacob Weisberg’s “Bush Tragedy” have underscored the role Oedipal rivalries may have played in George W. Bush’s presidency and his decision to go to war against Iraq, so this volume underscores the role that Freudian family dynamics may have played in Mr. bin Laden’s radicalization and his declaration of war against America.
