Halliburton's Army


Book Description

Halliburton'sArmy is the first book to show, in shocking detail, how Halliburton really does business, in Iraq, and around the world. From its vital role as the logistical backbone of the U.S. occupation in Iraq -- without Halliburton there could be no war or occupation -- to its role in covering up gang-rape amongst its personnel in Baghdad, Halliburton'sArmy is a devastating bestiary of corporate malfeasance and political cronyism. Pratap Chatterjee -- one of the world's leading authorities on corporate crime, fraud, and corruption -- shows how Halliburton won and then lost its contracts in Iraq, what Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld did for it, and who the company paid off in the U.S. Congress. He brings us inside the Pentagon meetings, where Cheney and Rumsfeld made the decision to send Halliburton to Iraq -- as well as many other hot-spots, including Somalia, Yugoslavia, Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, Guantámo Bay, and, most recently, New Orleans. He travels to Dubai, where Halliburton has recently moved its headquarters, and exposes the company's freewheeling ways: executives leading the high life, bribes, graft, skimming, offshore subsidiaries, and the whole arsenal of fraud. Finally, Chatterjee reveals the human costs of the privatization of American military affairs, which is sustained almost entirely by low-paid unskilled Third World workers who work in incredibly dangerous conditions without any labor protection. Halliburton'sArmy is a hair-raising exposéf one of the world's most lethal corporations, essential reading for anyone concerned about the nexus of private companies, government, and war.




Shock and Awe in Fort Worth


Book Description

After the Pentagon revealed it had secretly awarded the Iraq oil work to Halliburton, the Army Corps of Engineers' Fort Worth District was supposed to give other contractors a chance to bid. The irony is the competition for new contracts turned out to be far more corrupt than the sole-source award! The author, an independent consultant, led Bechtel's team in the competition until she discovered it was a sham and Bechtel withdrew. The competition appeased Pentagon critics because the fraud was never revealed - until now. They accused VP Cheney, former Halliburton CEO, of giving the work to cronies, based on circumstantial evidence, not proof. The critics never identified the bureaucratic pathway by which payback was achieved or even a single link in the chain. This book presents hard evidence of favoritism for the first time. It identifies missing links between Cheney and the Halliburton contract awards by the Corps and shows how they lied and cheated Halliburton's competitors. It also reveals why competitors who knew what happened never complained, why procurement fraud and contracting abuse are only going to get worse, and what we have to do to stop it. "Shock and Awe in Fort Worth" is the first book written from the inside of the government-industry 'secret fraternity.' The author has written proposals that have won billions of dollars of government work, including Bechtel's Iraq civil infrastructure contracts with USAID worth $3.1B. Bestsellers attack the Bush administration from the left; others defend it from the right. This is the first book to present a constructive, nonpartisan examination of the Iraq contracting debacle and a path forward out of the quagmire of contracting abuse. Government dependence on contractors is growing at an alarming rate, while the staff selecting and overseeing them, to ensure hard-earned tax dollars are well spent, has decreased dramatically - over 50% in Defense alone. Every taxpayer needs to read this book!




The Halliburton Agenda


Book Description

The author of the bestseller The Iron Triangle untangles a web of political back scratching in one of the world's most powerful companies Halliburton-a Texas oil-field company Dick Cheney ran before he became Vice President-has courted controversy for the better part of the twentieth century, but only recently has it received intense media scrutiny. In The Halliburton Agenda, Halliburton and its subsidiaries form the foundation of a fascinating story of influence peddling and behind-the-scenes political maneuvering that has only increased in momentum over the last decade-culminating in a firestorm of problems arising as soon as Cheney took office. This intriguing book shows readers where Halliburton has been doing business and with whom-topping the list so far are Iran, Iraq, and Libya. It also reveals how this juggernaut of a corporation has engaged in a cycle of profits that begins by selling products and services to potential terrorist states, contracting with the federal government during times of war against those states, then gaining valuable rebuilding contracts to help repair those states. It will also show how a Halliburton subsidiary, Kellogg Brown & Root, has become an indispensable part of the U.S. military, so much so that the two are indistinguishable at times. Halliburton is one of the first American companies to recognize the importance of aligning itself with powerful politicians, heavily contributing to campaigns, then cashing in on lucrative government contracts. Engaging and informative, The Halliburton Agenda carefully explores the arc of the company's success, its use of political affiliation, and the scope of its international business.




Love My Rifle More than You: Young and Female in the U.S. Army


Book Description

“Brave, honest, and necessary.”—Nancy Pearl, NPR Seattle Kayla Williams is one of the 15 percent of the U.S. Army that is female, and she is a great storyteller. With a voice that is “funny, frank and full of gritty details” (New York Daily News), she tells of enlisting under Clinton; of learning Arabic; of the sense of duty that fractured her relationships; of being surrounded by bravery and bigotry, sexism and fear; of seeing 9/11 on Al-Jazeera; and of knowing she would be going to war. With a passion that makes her memoir “nearly impossible to put down” (Buffalo News) Williams shares the powerful gamut of her experiences in Iraq, from caring for a wounded civilian to aiming a rifle at a child. Angry at the bureaucracy and the conflicting messages of today’s military, Williams offers us “a raw, unadulterated look at war” (San Antonio Express News) and at the U.S. Army. And she gives us a woman’s story of empowerment and self-discovery.




Leaving Aberdeen: Memoir of a Southern Girl


Book Description

Rural Mississippi in the 1950s was a world filled with racism where Black sharecropping families struggled just to break even. Yet the love of her close-knit family gave Estell Sims the foundation she needed to excel despite overt racism and being treated like a second-class citizen. When Estell's oldest brother lost his life fighting in Korea, his small life-insurance policy payout allowed the Sims family to buy their own house and move to nearby Aberdeen, but Estell had bigger dreams of going to college and someday moving to a big city like Chicago. After completing her freshman year at Tuskegee University, Estell boarded a Trailways bus and headed to New York City for a summer job. She had no idea how much her life would change the day her cousin met her at the Port Authority bus station and took the nineteen-year-old back to meet her friends, including handsome and charming US Army soldier Joseph A. Halliburton. Estell was amazed by the opportunities available in the city to people who looked like her, something she'd never experienced in the segregated South. Her worldview grew as she attended cultural events, learned to dress professionally, and embraced her heritage as a Black woman. Yet more compelling than anything else was Joseph, and after a whirlwind romance, the two were married just ten days before his deployment to Vietnam. Leaving Aberdeen is the story of a young Southern girl's awakening during a turbulent time of racial reckoning, from reading torn textbooks in a one-room schoolhouse to attending a premier HBCU, from professional modeling to motherhood, and from accepting her "place" to supporting her husband's membership as a Black Panther. Through it all, Estell's love-for and from her parents, siblings, relatives, husband, children, and friends-is a beacon of the hope that carried her through.




The Operators


Book Description

The inspiration for the Netflix original movie War Machine, starring Brad Pitt, Tilda Swinton, and Ben Kingsley From the author of The Last Magazine, a shocking behind-the-scenes portrait of our military commanders, their high-stake maneuvers, and the politcal firestorm that shook the United States. In the shadow of the hunt for Bin Laden and the United States’ involvement in the Middle East, General Stanley McChrystal, the commanding general of international and U.S. forces in Afghanistan, was living large. His loyal staff liked to call him a “rock star.” During a spring 2010 trip, journalist Michael Hastings looked on as McChrystal and his staff let off steam, partying and openly bashing the Obama administration. When Hastings’s article appeared in Rolling Stone, it set off a political firestorm: McChrystal was unceremoniously fired. In The Operators, Hastings picks up where his Rolling Stone coup ended. From patrol missions in the Afghan hinterlands to senior military advisors’ late-night bull sessions to hotel bars where spies and expensive hookers participate in nation-building, Hastings presents a shocking behind-the-scenes portrait of what he fears is an unwinnable war. Written in prose that is at once eye-opening and other times uncannily conversational, readers of No Easy Day will take to Hastings’ unyielding first-hand account of the Afghan War and its cast of players.




Mercenaries


Book Description

SOLDIERS OF $$ Privateers, contract killers, corporate warriors. Contract soldiers go by many names, but they all have one thing in common: They fight for money and plunder rather than liberty, God, or country. Now acclaimed author and war vet Michael Lee Lanning traces the compelling history of these fighting machines–from the “Sea Peoples” who fought for the pharaohs’ greater glory to today’s soldiers for hire from private military companies (PMCs) in Iraq and Afghanistan. What emerges is a fascinating account of the men who fight other people’s wars–the Greeks who built an empire for Alexander the Great, the Nubians who accompanied Hannibal across the Alps, the Irish who became the first to go global in their search for work. Soldiers of fortune have always had the power to change the course of war, and Lanning examines their pivotal roles in individual battles and in the rise and fall of empires. As the employment of contract soldiers spreads in Iraq and America’s War on Terrorism–the U.S. paid $30 billion to PMCs in 2003 alone–Mercenaries offers a valuable inside look at a system that appears embedded in our nation’s future. Includes eight pages of photographs




Saddle Soldiers


Book Description

The night after the commander of the 4th South Carolina Regiment sent his men home, he burned the wagon with the regiment's records rather than have it fall into enemy hands. Lloyd Halliburton has reconstructed the story from General Stokes' personal correspondence and memorabilia.




The Business of Civil War


Book Description

This wide-ranging, original account of the politics and economics of the giant military supply project in the North reconstructs an important but little-known part of Civil War history. Drawing on new and extensive research in army and business archives, Mark R. Wilson offers a fresh view of the wartime North and the ways in which its economy worked when the Lincoln administration, with unprecedented military effort, moved to suppress the rebellion. This task of equipping and sustaining Union forces fell to career army procurement officers. Largely free from political partisanship or any formal free-market ideology, they created a mixed military economy with a complex contracting system that they pieced together to meet the experience of civil war. Wilson argues that the North owed its victory to these professional military men and their finely tuned relationships with contractors, public officials, and war workers. Wilson also examines the obstacles military bureaucrats faced, many of which illuminated basic problems of modern political economy: the balance between efficiency and equity, the promotion of competition, and the protection of workers' welfare. The struggle over these problems determined the flow of hundreds of millions of dollars; it also redirected American political and economic development by forcing citizens to grapple with difficult questions about the proper relationships among government, business, and labor. Students of the American Civil War will welcome this fresh study of military-industrial production and procurement on the home front—long an obscure topic.




The Burn Pits


Book Description

“There’s a whole chapter on my son Beau… He was co-located [twice] near these burn pits.” –Joe Biden, former Vice President of the United States of America The Agent Orange of the 21st Century… Thousands of American soldiers are returning from the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan with severe wounds from chemical war. They are not the victims of ruthless enemy warfare, but of their own military commanders. These soldiers, afflicted with rare cancers and respiratory diseases, were sickened from the smoke and ash swirling out of the “burn pits” where military contractors incinerated mountains of trash, including old stockpiles of mustard and sarin gas, medical waste, and other toxic material. This shocking work, now for the first time in paperback, includes: Illustration of the devastation in one soldier’s intimate story A plea for help Connection between the burn pits and Major Biden’s unfortunate suffering and death The burn pits’ effects on native citizens of Iraq: mothers, fathers, and children Denial from the Department of Defense and others Warning signs that were ignored and much more Based on thousands of government documents, over five hundred in-depth medical case studies, and interviews with more than one thousand veterans and active-duty GIs, The Burn Pits will shock the nation. The book is more than an explosive work of investigative journalism—it is the deeply moving chronicle of the many young men and women who signed up to serve their country in the wake of 9/11, only to return home permanently damaged, the victims of their own armed forces’ criminal negligence.