Halliburton is a handy target for Democrats

[Rose Siding]

In the fall of 2002, a group of Pentagon advisers assessing the condition of Iraq's oil fields saw the need for a plan to repair damage from the impending war. The effort had to be secret, because the government had not publicly committed itself to fighting, and it had to be done by trustworthy experts.

The Energy Infrastructure Planning Group turned to a familiar resource: Halliburton Co., the global oil services company where Dick Cheney was chief executive until a couple of weeks after he was nominated for vice president.

It was a small project, worth $1.9 million to a company that brought in $12.6 billion in revenue that year. But it turned out to be the bridge to something much larger. Four months later, Pentagon officials granted Kellogg Brown & Root Inc., Halliburton's engineering and construction subsidiary, one of the contracting plums of the war: a classified no-bid deal worth up to $7 billion to do the restoration work.

Details about the genesis of those secret contracts have become part of an intensifying election-year effort by Democrats in Congress and the presidential campaign of Sen. John F. Kerry to question whether Halliburton became one of the Defense Department's favorite contractors because Cheney is vice president..........

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6032364/