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Cheney was its CEO until 2000. What a sweet subsidiary of Halliburton is KBR, Inc. (formerly Kellogg Brown & Root):

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.

{ 6:50 PM }

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