Musings 156--"Lessons learned."

Vice President Dick Cheney's old company Halliburton is being booted by the Army. It seems that the military has learned what I reported here years ago--Halliburton is getting rich off the deaths of U. S. Troops. (See Link)

There have been numerous reports in the media about bad water and over-charging for services by the corporate giant. The Senate even held hearings in 2005 about the charges of bad food and water. (See Link 2)

Now it is a year later and the Army is finally doing something about the problems. According to spokesman Dave Foster, this is part of the army's "lessons learned" process. Now that is scary! The army has been around since 1776 and it is just now learning that no-bid contracts result in abuse. Some organizations are really, really, really slow learners.

"The Army lives on 'lessons-learned.' We get better each and every time we do it," Foster said in an Associated Press stroy written by Pauline Jelinek. "There's discussion under way that there may be--may be-- a better way of doing this. If you open it up to as many as three bids, that offers more open competition."

Three bids...three bids! Wow, if I were a soldier, I'd feel really good about that.

"It has taken them far too long," Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., in the same AP story, said of the Army. "I believe literally hundreds of millions, and probably billions, of dollars have been wasted — it's almost an unbelievable amount of waste and abuse and likely fraud."

Personally, I think an investigation into what Halliburton did and where the waste and abuse was would be in order. It won't happen, since the Republicans control both houses. There has been absolutely no accounting of anything by the Congress on this so-called "War on Terror."