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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TideGlider who wrote (509667)	12/14/2003 7:30:31 PM
From: Rick McDougall	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

Bechtel Bechtel 1015 15th Street Washington, DC 5275 Westview Dr. Frederick, MD 8180 Greensboro Dr., Suite 900 McLean, VA As of this writing, the Bush/Cheney administration had announced that Bechtel, one of the largest construction contractors in the world, is one of two finalists bidding for the first post-war reconstruction contracts for Iraq. The contracts, which are being handed out in a closed bidding process, are worth $900 million. And there are many more sure to come. The Bush administration hasn't released an estimate of how much rebuilding Iraq will cost, but the American Academy of Arts and Sciences estimated it at $30 billion to $105 billion in the next decade, depending on the scope of the work. "The administration has made potential use of shortcuts and exceptions that let it put literally billions of taxpayer dollars in the hands of selected contractors" without having to use an open-bidding process, Charles Tiefer, a law professor at the University of Baltimore and the author of a casebook on government contracting told The Washington Post. The contracts are probably no surprise to those who recall how well-connected Bechtel was during the Reagan administration. These connections -- which include board member and former Secretary of State George Schultz and onetime executive Caspar W. Weinberger, the former secretary of defense-- were spelled out in Laton McCartney's book, Friends in High Places. Bechtel still has friends in high places. For example, Jack Sheehan, a senior vice president at Bechtel, sits on the same Defense Policy Board that Richard Perle chaired before he resigned due to conflicts of interest. Campaign donations of $1.3 million from 1999 to 2002 have probably also helped to keep the company's friends in Washington from forgetting the San Francisco-based company. No one giving out contracts to rebuild Iraq seems to be bothered by reports that Bechtel is on the list, released by the German paper Die Tageszeitung, of U.S. corporations that supplied Saddam Hussein with "dual use" chemical production technology prior to 1991. Nor do they seem to be bothered by evidence uncovered by the Sustainable Energy and Economy Network that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld worked behind the scenes in the mid-1980s to press Saddam Hussein to approve Bechtel's Aqaba pipeline project from Iraq to Jordan, despite having knowledge of Hussein's ongoing use of chemical weapons.