If This Doesn't Prove the Fix Was on in Iraq, Nothing Will

Gulfnews published a shocking story yesterday that ought to outright prove how shady and corrupt this war in Iraq always has been.

According to recently-unsealed federal court records, several of the largest corporations servicing our military in Iraq have been indicted for using bribery and kickbacks to secure those tens of billions in wartime contracts... before the invasion.

So much for Bush piously holding out hope for diplomacy with Saddam until the last minute.

So, before we as a nation knew whether we'd go to war with Iraq, the Bush administration and the military industrial complex that loves it were in on the fix. To date, there is still a roughly one to one ratio between military troops and contractors.

Among the revelations marshalled together by Gulfnews comes this gem from the Boston Globe:

Halliburton reportedly had 58 offshore subsidiaries in Caribbean tax havens. When Vice-President Dick Cheney was Halliburton Chief Executive Officer before he got into politics, Halliburton's tax payments to the US government evaporated, going from $302 million in 1998 to zero in 1999.

Of course, we all know that Cheney was still getting deferred executive compensation from Halliburton until at least 2004, the year after the invasion.

Now we know why people like Susan Lindauer were at first ignored then persecuted for trying to stop the Bush administration from recklessly invading Iraq. Too many billions were at stake. Now we know why Bunny Greenhouse, who oversaw the legality of contract procurements at the Pentagon, was unceremonious shitcanned when she questioned several contracts signed between the military and Halliburton.

And I keep thinking about Donald Rumsfeld marching to the Pentagon briefing room one fine morning saying that we were going to outsource to private corporations everything under the sun and that we, the American taxpayer, had to fund it whether we liked it or not.

The next day, that same Pentagon was hit (if we're to accept to official narrative) by al Qaeda hijackers and the feeding frenzy was on.