Top Ten War Profiteers of 2004

[hangloose]

At the beginning of the Iraq war, Andrew Natsios, head of the U.S. Agency for International Development (AID), proclaimed that the reconstruction of Iraq would look like a modern-day Marshall Plan. But a year and a half later, a combination of bureaucratic ineptitude, corporate corruption and the growing Iraqi resistance threaten to undermine the Bush administration’s grand designs.

In mid-July, U.S. officials admitted that fewer than 140 of the 2,300 reconstruction projects funded by the U.S. were underway. Although AID says “dirt has been turned” on 1,167 projects including schools and hospitals, with at least 70 new ones staring each week, it’s unlikely that the big picture has changed much. The kidnapping and execution of contract personnel and the ongoing sabotage of key projects—power plants, electricity lines and oil pipelines—has slowed work in many areas of the country to a crawl, jacking up the cost of security, insurance and other ancillary expenditures, which in most cases amount to half of the contractors’ budgets.

By August, Ambassador John Negroponte had to announce that more than $3 billion of $18 billion in U.S. aid earmarked by Congress for engineering and reconstruction work would be used for security and counterinsurgency operations.

<snip>



The Center for Corporate Policy’s Top Ten War Profiteers of 2004

1) AEGIS
2) Bearing Point
3) Bechtel
4) BKSH & Associates
5) CACI and Titan
6) Custer Battles
7) Halliburton
8) Lockheed Martin
9) Loral Satellite
10) Qualcomm

Excellent article lots of insight to how our money is being spent and wasted.

http://www.guerrillanews.com/articles/article.php?id=1029

[Bombtrack]

1. thanks. It's kind of hard to know how to combat this

really frigging blows. It's not like average people can go, "I'm gonna boycott halliburton"

[the_bidenator]

2. Wow...

All Republican loving companies... who could have guessed???