SPRINGFIELD, ILL. - Three months after leaving his job, a former Halliburton Co. procurement manager in Kuwait received a $1 million kickback from a subcontractor he had helped select for millions of dollars' worth of business, federal prosecutors say.
In the first criminal charges to emanate from Houston-based Halliburton's military-contract work in the Middle East, a Peoria, Ill., grand jury has charged both the one-time procurement manager and a Saudi businessman with defrauding the federal government out of more than $3.5 million.
The 10-count indictment made public Thursday accuses Jeff Alex Mazon, 36, and Ali Hijazi, a Saudi national and managing partner of Kuwait-based La Nouvelle General Trading and Contracting Co., of scheming to drive up subcontractors' bids for supplying fuel tanker trucks at a U.S. military airport in Kuwait.
Neither Halliburton nor its KBR subsidiary was named in the indictment.
Historians' future summaries of W's administration will consist of a single word: "fraud."
"The Ebbers trial is a bellwether for Lay," said David Berg, a Houston trial lawyer who has watched both cases. "Both are huge financial frauds at the heart of the businesses, both involve billions of hidden losses ... and both men claim to have been removed from the day-to-day business."
Because the jury convicted Ebbers on all charges, they must have searched hard for evidence against him on each charge, highlighting the difficulty of getting jurors to believe the "What's a poor boy to do?" defense, he said.
Ebbers, who grew up without much in Mississippi, testified that he was never made aware that accountants were falsifying books at the company. The defense claims former Chief Financial Officer Scott Sullivan masterminded the fraud.
Lay, who was raised on a Missouri farm, has said much the same thing in his own defense, down to blaming his former CFO for much of the trouble at Enron.
Farm, schmarm. In Lay's case, a simple comparison of what he did privately (sold Enron stock) to what he said publicly ("buy Enron stock") should help clarify his involvement in the Enron frauds.
Whenever leaders prophesy, profound things happen. When their prophesies turn out to be calculated lies, the fortunes and lives of their followers are lost.
Because society reacts to what leaders say, whenever they promote imaginary resources, false prospects, or non-existent threats (think WMDs), the proper response is to relieve them of their positions and send them to jail. Ebbers will likely spend the rest of his life in prison, and so should Ken Lay who squirreled away enough fraudulently-gained investments to guarantee himself an annual income of $912,000 for life.
Remember: the proposed Social Security private accounts will be invested in the enterprises of the Ebberses and Lays of the world. Doesn't that make you want to bet your life savings on their integrity?
ROME -- Italy will start the process of withdrawing troops from Iraq in September, Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi said Tuesday, marking the beginning of a pullback of a key member of the U.S.-led coalition forces there.
"Beginning in September we will begin a progressive reduction of the number of our soldiers in Iraq," Mr. Berlusconi said on a television talk show that was to be broadcast late Tuesday evening. The comments were confirmed on the government's official Web site.
Italy has maintained a force of around 3,000 soldiers in Iraq since 2003, one of the largest forces in the coalition. Despite persistent protests from the center-left opposition and public opinion polls which showed a majority of Italians opposed involvement, Mr. Berlusconi has remained a steadfast ally of the U.S., affirming his support for the mission even in the face of setbacks for Italian forces.
The most dramatic of those setbacks arose on March 4, when U.S. soldiers at a checkpoint outside the Baghdad airport opened fire on a vehicle containing an Italian intelligence officer and a recently released Italian hostage. The intelligence officer, who had secured the release of the hostage only hours before, was killed, further inflaming public opinion in Italy and drawing the ire even of some of Mr. Berlusconi's close political allies, who raised questions about whether Italy had become too subservient toward the U.S.
The only thing missing is the crucial context of the story.
In the article above, the carefully chosen generic word "hostage" is deflecting the much wider context of the story — namely, that this supposedly generic "hostage" was Giuliana Sgrena, the journalist who had reported on possible use of napalm by American forces:
«We buried them, but we could not identify them because they were charred from the napalm bombs used by the Americans». People from Saqlawiya village, near Falluja, told al Jazeera television, based in Qatar, that they helped bury 73 bodies of women and children completely charred, all in the same grave. The sad story of common graves, which started at Saddam’s times, is not yet finished. Nobody could confirm if napalm bombs have been used in Falluja, but other bodies found last year after the fierce battle at Baghdad airport were also completely charred and some thought of nuclear bombs. No independent source could verify the facts, since all the news arrived until now are those spread by journalists embedded with the American troops, who would only allow British and American media to enrol with them. But the villagers who fled in the last few days spoke of many bodies which had not been buried: it was too dangerous to collect the corpses during the battle.
When the hostage isn't a mere bystander but an active reporter of possible war crimes by the people who killed her countryman while he was trying to protect her, the word "hostage" just won't do.
For a newspaper as self-appointedly serious as the Wall Street Journal, omitting such salient details from a life-and-death story of international importance crosses the boundary from simple incompetence into calculated complicity.
After two wars where oil wells were torched, chemical factories bombed and radioactive ammunition fired, the first thing Iraqi women ask when giving birth is not if it is a boy or a girl, but if it is normal or deformed. The number of cancer cases and children born with deformities has skyrocketed after the two Gulf Wars.
"Since 1991 the number of children born with birth deformities has quadrupled," said Dr. Janan Hassan, who runs a children's clinic at a hospital in Basra in southern Iraq. "The same is the case for the number of children under 15 who are diagnosed with cancer. Mostly, it is leukemia. Almost 80 percent of the children die because we neither have medicine nor the possibility to give them chemotherapy."
Doctors have also recorded an extreme rise in cancer cases among adults. "In 2004 we diagnosed 25 percent more cancer cases than the year before and the mortality rate increased eight-fold between 1988 and 1991," said Dr. Jawad al-Ali of the Sadr Hospital in Basra.
Hassan and al-Ali are two of 15 Iraqi specialists who have joined forces with German scientists in a project to research diseases provoked by acts of war, financed by the German Academic Exchange Service.
In Iraq, burning oil wells, bombed chemical factories, demolished production sites for chemical weapons and even the use of radioactive ammunition are just a few of the things which may have triggered diseases there.
"As epidemiologists, we are quite sure that other diseases than cancer and birth deformities also have to be considered," said project leader Wolfgang Hoffmann from the University of Greifswald.
The scientists involved in the project met through the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW). All have a special interest in the consequences of using depleted-uranium (DU) ammunition, the German project's main focus.
In the two US-led wars on Iraq, missile warheads containing the depleted uranium-238 were used. While it is only lightly radioactive, it is an extremely tough waste-product to contain because the uranium pulverizes and contaminates the whole surrounding area with radioactivity at the moment of the explosion.
"Naturally, the nations leading the war refuse to acknowldege that this type of uranium can be harmful. But as an epidemiologist, I have to say that every bit of radiation can give rise to cancer. It's just a question if what was fired in this case led to an increase in the number of cancer cases," said Professor Eberhard Greiser from the University of Bremen.
As with many of the questions arising from the project so far, there is no definite answer. But al-Ali tried to give a partial answer.
"In Basra in 1991, the Americans and the British dropped at least 300 tons of this kind of ammunition in one battle. That was the battle where they destroyed all the tanks of the then Republican Army. After the war, the population was urged to gather all weapons and sell them to the government. Also if people had guns or bazookas or whatever they found in the desert, they were told to bring it with them," he said.
According to al-Ali's calculations, approximately 750,000 people in Basra and the surrounding areas were exposed to radiation as a result.
The doctors say the connection between the contamination of hundred of thousands of people on one side and the rising number of cancer cases on the other is beyond doubt, but proving it is not easy.
"To prove it, we would have to demonstrate that there was uranium 238 on the patients' clothes or in their body fluid. And besides, cancer is a multi-causal disease. How would we be able to give 100 percent proof?" al-Ali asked.
Despite the resigned attitudes among many of her colleagues, Hassan firmly believes that the radioactive missiles used by the Americans and the British are responsible for the increased incidence of cancer in Iraq since the early 1990s. She hopes a future independent Iraqi government will seek compensation from Washington and London. "We have to demand it. That is the price of the war," she said.
What evil policymakers could have devised a such pointlessly cruel strategy as to bomb with radioactivity, with the full expectation that civilians would be recruited for gathering up the weapons that remain?
What executives and policymakers did the two Gulf Wars have in common? Hmmm, it'll come to me...
