NYT Front|Back: Germ-Free Campaigning vs. Dirty U.S. Contracts in Iraq

FRONT:

In Clean Politics, Flesh Is Pressed, Then Sanitized
In the final days of a campaign season, with so much at stake for the future of our country, what could be more important than the growing popularity of hand sanitizer among politicians? I wish this were satire. Then it might be funny. Instead, this article must go down as one of the saddest excuses for a cover story our Paper of Record could present at the moment.

Though the story makes cotton candy appear weighty, it still manages, however, to paint one politician (and only one), Bill Clinton, in an unfavorable light.

In one semifamous cleanliness lapse in the 1992 presidential campaign, Bill Clinton, who had just shaken dozens of hands at a tavern in Boston, was handed a pie but no fork on his way to the car. The ravenous Mr. Clinton promptly devoured it using his unwashed hand.

Nice. Take a president crucified for a blowjob and describe him eating pie with the words "ravenous" and "devoured." The implied debauchery is palpable. You can almost hear the editors chuckling over the ham-handed subtext.

Intro:

Campaigns are filthy. Not only in terms of last-minute smears and dirty tricks. But also as in germs, parasites and all the bacterial unpleasantness that is spread around through so much glad-handing and flesh-pressing.

Excerpts:

Politics is personal at all levels, and germs do not discriminate. Like chicken dinners and lobbyists, they afflict Democrats and Republicans alike. It would be difficult to find an entourage that does not have at least one aide packing Purell.

...

Mr. [Bill] Richardson said that if he ran for president, as he is considering, he had no intention of conforming to the norms of his antiseptic peers.

“I just won’t use the sanitizer,” he said. “I’ve been offered it, but I’ve turned it down.”

This positions Mr. Richardson as the early hygienic maverick of 2008.

“I’m not afraid to get my hands dirty,” he said.

(Incidentally, the article ended on these words. A story so cloying, pointless and insulting to the intelligence of its readers that I felt like I needed a hand sanitizer after putting it down.)

BACK (Page A8):

Report Says Iraq Contractor Is Hiding Data From U.S.
First, this headline is unnecessarily misleading. The "Iraq contractor" in question is Halliburton subsidiary KBR, an American company. As such, the headline gives the false impression that an Iraq company is concealing something from the U.S. government, when it is actually the subsidiary of Vice President Cheney's former company. KBR, along with Halliburton, is part of Cheney's group of war profiteers that have been bilking American taxpayers for billions of dollars while botching everything in their path.

In an election-season gift to the Bush administration, The Times editors not only keep this story off the cover, but the headline further obfuscates who is behind this shameless war profiteering.

KBR's contracts, totaling about $20 billion, "are for housing, food, fuel and other necessities for American troops and government officials in Iraq, and for restoring that country’s crucial oil infrastructure."

So what is KBR is hiding?

The oversight agency, the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, said KBR had refused to disclose information as basic as how many people are fed each day in its dining facilities and how many gallons of fuel are delivered to foreign embassies in Iraq, claiming that the data was proprietary, meaning it would unfairly help its business competitors.

Would you expect anything less from a Halliburton subsidiary?

Here's how KBR has gotten away with it thus far:

Proprietary information is protected by the so-called federal acquisition regulations, known as FAR. But the agency said KBR routinely stamped nearly all of the data it collects on its work as proprietary, impeding not only the investigations into the company’s activities but also things as simple as managerial oversight of the work.

While our soldiers are dying at an ever-alarming rate, with October the deadliest month of the year, Cheney's corporate raiders continue to busily rape the Iraq war chest. Abundantly clear as well is that had there been fair bidding for contracts, KBR - also under investigation for multiple shady dealings, some dating back two decades - would have almost certainly been denied business without Cheney's scheming.

Excerpts:

“The use of proprietary data markings on reports and information submitted by KBR to the government is an abuse of the FAR and the procurement system,” says a memo released yesterday by the special inspector general.

As a result, the memo said, “KBR is not protecting its own data, but is in many instances inappropriately restricting the government’s use of information that KBR is required to gather for the government.”

...

A spokeswoman for Halliburton, Cathy Mann, did not dispute the company’s extensive use of the proprietary label but said, “KBR has included proprietary markings on the majority of its data and property in support of its government contracts for the U.S. Army for at least the last decade.”

...

Ms. Mann added that KBR believed that the use of proprietary markings in work for the United States government “is not only encouraged, but required” by federal laws restricting the disclosure of American trade secrets abroad.

With the release of the new memo, that argument is unlikely to gain much traction with members of Congress, federal investigators and the numerous critics who have been calling for access to information on KBR’s work in Iraq almost since the invasion ended.

“The arrogance is astounding on the part of KBR,” said William L. Nash, a retired Army major general who is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and an expert on postconflict zones. “It’s time for Congress to step in, because this has just gone too far.”

...

The company could have other liabilities. Outside Iraq, the papers say, there is a Justice Department investigation into possible overcharges in its work in the Balkans from 1996 to 2000. And the securities commission and the Justice Department are investigating payments in Nigeria that may have violated the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which bars the bribing of foreign officials.

There is also an antitrust investigation, and the company says investigations into the Nigerian project found information that “former employees may have engaged in coordinated bidding with one or more competitors on certain foreign construction projects and that such coordination possibly began as early as the mid-1980s.”

The memo by the inspector general said that KBR would sometimes provide data to one part of the United States government, like Pentagon auditors, but with the proprietary label that would prevent its release to the public or even to other parts of the government.

In other cases that clearly irritated the inspector general’s auditors, KBR would hobble their work by releasing data in the form of gigantic but indigestible tables rather than within the kind of software — like Excel spreadsheets — that would let the auditors do their calculations.

Those findings have raised suspicions that if KBR was going to such lengths to keep the data out of the hands of auditors, then the company must have something to hide, said Frederick D. Barton, a director of the Postconflict Reconstruction Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

“There’s been smoke for some time,” Mr. Barton said. “This seems to indicate that there was fire as well.”

Comments

[MediaBloodhound]

Germ-Free Campaigning vs. Dirty U.S. Contracts in Iraq

[jay]

Given the growing # of cases reported where Purell hand sanitizers are being directly linked to cases of alcohol poisoning, it would lead some to wonder whether all of the campaigners aren't using their little bottles of Purell to medicate themselves unobtrusively. To keep campaigning fair, balanced and non-toxic, Soapopular, a Canadian manufacturer with a non-alcohol-based, yet entirely effective germ/bacteria killing hand sanitizer has just launched in the US. Great product (and no sticky gel or annoying fragrance)...www.soapopular.com