War & Disaster Profiteering

The new rules mandate background checks and permission from the military before a contractor can carry a weapon, and they spell out conditions for medical care and evacuation. At least 524 U.S. military contract workers, many of them Iraqis, have been killed in Iraq since the March 2003 invasion. Read More

The United Nations' oil-for-food program was so badly managed and supervised that more than half of the 4,500 companies doing business with Iraq paid illegal surcharges and kickbacks to Saddam Hussein, finds an independent investigation into the program. Read More

The Army Corps of Engineers has settled payment disputes for six out of 10 task orders costing about $1.4 billion under its Restore Iraqi Oil contract with Houston-based Halliburton. Auditors concluded the military had been overcharged by about $108.4 million for fuel brought into Iraq from Kuwait under the orders. Read More

Federal auditors say the prime contractor, Unisys Corp., overbilled taxpayers for as much as 171,000 hours' worth of labor and overtime by charging up to $131 an hour for employees who were paid less than half that amount while working on a $1 billion technology contract to improve the nation's transportation security system. Read More

The American government is hiring private security firms to stabilise Iraq - and paying them a fortune to do it. But many of them are unregulated and operate outside the law. Read More

Federal agents have identified 10 suspected illegal immigrants working at a naval base near New Orleans where the Halliburton Co. subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root is leading hurricane reconstruction, according to a spokeswoman for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Read More

Scores of illegal immigrants working as cooks, laborers, janitors, even foreign-language instructors working for military contractors have been seized at military bases around the country in the past year, raising concerns in some quarters about security and troop safety. Read More

Then the 61-year-old Greenhouse lost her $137,000-a-year post after questioning the plump contracts awarded to Halliburton in the run-up to the war in Iraq. It has made her easy to love for some, easy to loathe for others, but it has not made her easy to know. Read More

The chief Pentagon agency charged with investigating and reporting fraud and waste in Iraq quietly pulled out of the war zone a year ago -- leaving what experts say are gaps in the oversight of how more than $140 billion is being spent. Read More

The United States has long condemned the practices that are now part of the privatization of the American war effort and which is central to the operations of Halliburton subsidiary KBR, the U.S. military's biggest private contractor in Iraq. Read More