Dome Petroleum referred to in my post is part of Dome International based in Dubai, which I suppose makes it a company registered in the UAE, not Iraq as I first thought.

This is pretty pathetic, Teribus, considering the fact that nowhere in the page to which you linked is there any mention of which "Dome" they are referring to. As usual, you're just making up your "facts" as you go along.

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On the subject of war profiteers like Halliburton (and its various subsidiaries) and corruption...


http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?list=type&type=15

Halliburton

"The biggest windfall in the invasion of Iraq has most certainly gone to the oil services and logistics company Halliburton. The company, which was formerly run by Vice President Dick Cheney, had revenue of over $8 billion in contracts in Iraq in 2003 alone. And while Halliburton's dealings in Iraq have been dogged everywhere by scandal - including now a criminal investigation into overcharging by Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown and Root for gas shipped into Iraq - Vice President Cheney manages to be doing quite well from the deal. He owns $433,000 unexercised Halliburton stock options worth more than $10 million dollars.

But Halliburton's history of benefiting from government largesse goes back a ways. From 1962 to 1972 the Pentagon paid the company tens of millions of dollars to work in South Vietnam, where they built roads, landing strips, harbors, and military bases from the demilitarized zone to the Mekong Delta. The company was one of the main contractors hired to construct the Diego Garcia air base in the Indian Ocean, according to Pentagon military histories.

In the early 1990s the company was awarded the job to study and then implement the privatization of routine army functions under then-secretary of defense Dick Cheney. When Cheney quit his Pentagon job, he landed the job of Halliburton's CEO, bringing with him his trusted deputy David Gribbin. The two substantially increased Halliburton's government business until they quit in 2000, once Cheney was elected vice president. This included a $2.2 billion bill for a Brown and Root contract to support US soldiers in Operation Just Endeavor in the Balkans.

After Cheney and Gribbin departed, another confidante of Cheney, Admiral Joe Lopez, former commander in chief for U.S. forces in southern Europe, took over Gribbin's old job of go-between for the government and the company, according to Brown and Root's own press releases.

In 2001 the company took in $13 billion in revenues, according to its latest annual report. Currently, Brown and Root estimates it has $740 million in existing U.S. government contracts (approximately 37 percent of its global business).

For example, in mid November 2001, Brown and Root was paid $2 million to reinforce the U.S. embassy in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, under contract with the State Department, according to the New York Times. More recently Brown and Root was paid $16 million by the federal government to go to Guantnamo Bay, Cuba, to build a 408-person prison for captured Taliban fighters, according to Pentagon press releases.

That's by no means all: Brown and Root employees can be found back home running support operations from Fort Knox, Kentucky, to a naval base in El Centro, California, according to company press releases. In December 2001, Brown and Root secured a 10-year deal named the Logistics Civil Augmentation Program (LOGCAP), from the Pentagon, which has already been estimated at $830 million.

Meanwhile independent agencies are still skeptical about claimed financial savings from contracting out military support operations. According to the Government Accounting Office (GAO), a February 1997 study showed that a Brown and Root operation in Bosnia estimated at $191.6 million when presented to Congress in 1996 had ballooned to $461.5 million a year later.

All told this former Yugoslavia contract has now cost the taxpayer $2.2 billion over the last several years. Examples of overspending by contractors include flying plywood from the United States to the Balkans at $85.98 a sheet and billing the army to pay its employees' income taxes in Hungary.

A subsequent GAO report, issued September 2000, showed that Brown and Root was still taking advantage of the contract in the Balkans. Army commanders were unable to keep track of the contract because they were typically rotated out of camps after a six-month duration, erasing institutional memory, according to the report. The GAO painted a picture of Brown and Root contract employees sitting idly most of the time. The report also noted that a lot of staff time was spent doing unnecessary tasks, such as cleaning offices four times a day. Pentagon officials were able to identify $72 million in cost savings on the Brown and Root contract simply by eliminating excess power generation equipment that the company had purchased for the operation.

Brown and Root has been also been investigated for over billing the government in its domestic operations. In February 2002, Brown and Root paid out $2 million to settle a suit with the Justice Department that alleged the company defrauded the government during the mid-1990s closure of Fort Ord in Monterey, California.

The allegations in the case surfaced several years ago when Dammen Gant Campbell, a former contracts manager for Brown and Root turned whistle-blower, charged that between 1994 and 1998 the company fraudulently inflated project costs by misrepresenting the quantities, quality, and types of materials required for 224 projects. Campbell said the company submitted a detailed "contractors pricing proposal" from an army manual containing fixed prices for some 30,000 line items.

Once the proposal was approved, the company submitted a more general "statement of work," which did not contain a breakdown of items to be purchased. Campbell maintained the company intentionally did not deliver many items listed in the original proposal. The company defended this practice by claiming the statement of work was the legally binding document, not the original contractors pricing proposal.

"Whether you characterize it as fraud or sharp business practices, the bottom line is the same: the government was not getting what it paid for," says Michael Hirst, of the United States Attorney's Office in Sacramento, who litigated the suit on behalf of the government. "We alleged that they exploited the contracting process and increased their profits at the governments expense.""

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Halliburton has been fleecing everyone on the cost of importing fuel from Kuwait and other locations...


http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/issues/iraq/after/2003/1210fuel.htm

"The United States government is paying the Halliburton Company an average of $2.64 a gallon to import gasoline and other fuel to Iraq from Kuwait, more than twice what others are paying to truck in Kuwaiti fuel, government documents show. Halliburton, which has the exclusive United States contract to import fuel into Iraq, subcontracts the work to a Kuwaiti firm, government officials said. But Halliburton gets 26 cents a gallon for its overhead and fee, according to documents from the Army Corps of Engineers.

The cost of the imported fuel first came to public attention in October when two senior Democrats in Congress criticized Halliburton, the huge Houston-based oil-field services company, for "inflating gasoline prices at a great cost to American taxpayers." At the time, it was estimated that Halliburton was charging the United States government and Iraq's oil-for-food program an average of about $1.60 a gallon for fuel available for 71 cents wholesale. But a breakdown of fuel costs, contained in Army Corps documents recently provided to Democratic Congressional investigators and shared with The New York Times, shows that Halliburton is charging $2.64 for a gallon of fuel it imports from Kuwait and $1.24 per gallon for fuel from Turkey....

... Iraqi's state oil company, SOMO, pays 96 cents a gallon to bring in gas, which includes the cost of gasoline and transportation costs, the aides to Mr. Waxman said. The gasoline transported by SOMO - and by Halliburton's subcontractor - are delivered to the same depots in Iraq and often use the same military escorts. The Pentagon's Defense Energy Support Center pays $1.08 to $1.19 per gallon for the gas it imports from Kuwait, Congressional aides said. That includes the price of the gas and its transportation costs.

The money for Halliburton's gas contract has come principally from the United Nations oil-for-food program, though some of the costs have been borne by American taxpayers. In the appropriations bill signed by Mr. Bush last month, taxpayers will subsidize all gas importation costs beginning early next year. In an interview on Tuesday, Mr. Waxman responded to the latest information on to costs of the Halliburton contract. "It's inexcusable that Americans are being charged absurdly high prices to buy gasoline for Iraqis and outrageous that the White House is letting it happen," he said. "

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And we can see that the Coalition Provisional Authority (appointed by the occupying countries) missed no opportunities to create a lack of transparency in their accounting practices, which has made it so much easier for US companies and other foreign companies to make a buck at the expense of the Iraqi people and US taxpayers...


http://www.soros.org/initiatives/cep/articles_publications/publications/irw_brief_20040624

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A53164-2004Jul15.html

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And just in case anyone is still wondering about what the oil industry's agenda is in Iraq, here are some excerpts from the page I linked to earlier...


"WASHINGTON, Nov 23 (IPS) - Oil exploration deals currently being negotiated between the Washington-backed Iraqi government and multinational oil companies could cost Iraqis up to 194 billion dollars in lost revenues and transfer more than two-thirds of the country's oil reserves to the control of foreign firms, a new report warns.

"In short, the winners for control of Iraq's oil are the U.S., the UK, and their oil companies," said Steve Kretzmann of Oil Change International and co-publisher of the report, "Crude Designs: The Rip-Off of Iraq's Oil Wealth".

"The losers are the Iraqi people," he added.

The report says that by binding the interim Iraqi government to a type of contract that gives the upper hand to their executives, multinational oil companies will guarantee themselves fat profit margins of 42 to 162 percent, far more the usual industry target of around 12 percent.

U.S. and British oil companies have been pressing for high returns on investments in Iraq, citing the country's volatile security and political situation.

"The form of contracts being promoted is the most expensive and undemocratic option available," said Greg Muttitt of PLATFORM, a London-based oil industry watchdog group. "Iraq's oil should be for the benefit of the Iraqi people, not foreign oil companies."

The contracts are called "production sharing agreements" (PSAs), which typically run between 25 and 40 years and are off-limits to public scrutiny...

...critics note that the terms of such contracts, now keenly promoted by the U.S. and Britain, bar local authorities from amending them in the future and are subject to confidentiality provisions.

Developed in the 1960s, the contracts keep legal ownership of oil reserves in state hands, thus avoiding allegations that national wealth has been transferred to foreign hands. But in practice, they give oil companies the same results as the concession agreements they replaced. PSAs guarantee investors stable taxes for the life of the project.

Iraqis will not be able to contest the contracts in their own courts, because they require that all disputes be heard by international investment tribunals. Such tribunals have traditionally ruled based on commercial interests rather than on national interests, international law or human rights...

...The study points a finger at a group of powerful Iraqi politicians and technocrats who are pushing for this system of long-term contracts with foreign oil companies. This, the report finds, "will be beyond the reach of Iraqi courts, public scrutiny or democratic control".

Authors of the report say their findings confirm, as many Iraqis have long believed, that one of the reasons for the U.S-led invasion of Iraq was to share the spoils of war with oil companies in Iraq, a country that has the world's third largest oil reserves.

"Many Iraqis believe that the war was waged for oil and Iraqi public opinion is overwhelmingly against the U.S.-led occupation, so entering into secret arrangements with foreign oil companies will only increase the chances of political instability," said Erik Leaver, a research at the Washington-based Institute for Policy Studies, also a co-author of the report.

PSAs are not the only option available, says the report, quoting International Atomic Energy Agency figures that show that this type of contract is only used for about 12 percent of the world's oil reserves, mostly in countries with high production costs and uncertain exploration results.

The report suggests that as an alternative to the PSAs, Iraq can finance its oil production by getting international oil companies to sign shorter-term and less restrictive contracts. They can also fund exploration with their own money, or even use future oil flows as collateral to borrow funds, regionally or internationally.

If the Arab country, whose occupiers say they are there to promote freedom and democracy, follows along with the proposed PSAs, the report cautions, "Iraq could be surrendering its democracy as soon as it achieves it.""

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On the other hand, I think it is worth pointing out that the only thing that has changed in the last year or so as compared to how things were being done before, is the media coverage of these kinds of things. These things didn't just suddenly start happening all of a sudden during the last year or two, and yet the mainstream media in the US either completely ignored them, or they actively supressed any reportage of them until fairly recently. Why would they ignore it before, and only start to address it recently? I think it's because the mainstream media in the US is heavily influenced by the people who want Iraq to become balkanized, and those people know that if the US removes its troops now, Iraq will split apart into warring ethnic states.

I don't know what the answers are, but I'd like to see some transparency in the way the US does business, especially with regard to what is being done in Iraq, and I think that the first question that should be asked (and answered) when any kinds of decisions are being made about Iraq is "will the results of this decision benefit the Iraqi people first and foremost". Anything else is conflict of interest, and calls into question the motives of the governments of the "coalition" countries for their involvement in the invasion and occupation of Iraq.