halliburton. proud.

Okay, I just read this on Library Bitch: Guess who's got a contract (made in JULY no less) for "debris removal and other emergency work associated with natural disasters" at Mississippi naval airbases? Give up? Of course not!
We all know who gets government contracts out of this administration, that's right (all together now, keeds:) HALLIBURTON!!! Of course, the administration's incompetence in the face of Katrina is once again demonstrated by a complete lack of a Halliburton clean-up contract for New Orleans. Talk about your missed opportunities! BushCo cant even do it's graft well! It's not like after gutting the budget for flood control in New Orleans that a need for clean-up couldnt have been foreseen by all but the stupidest of people.
Still, it's not too late. After all, one of the reasons KBR (a Halliburton subsidiary) got the Iraqi oil-field contract without having to compete for it was...

because, according to the Army's classified contingency plan for repairing Iraq's infrastructure, KBR was the only company with the skills, resources and security clearances to do the job on short notice.

Of course, who wrote the Army's contingency plan? Duh, KBR, a division of <fanfare> Halliburton! </fanfare>. But wait, there's more:

From 1997 to 2000, when Cheney was running Halliburton, two of its subsidiaries sold Saddam Hussein's government a total of $73 million in oil-field supplies. The deal didn't violate U.S. sanctions because the subsidiaries, Dresser-Rand and Ingersoll Dresser Pump Company, were foreign. KBR/Halliburton, then, has rounded the bases when it comes to Iraq. It got rich doing business with Iraq, it got rich preparing to destroy Iraq and it's now getting rich rebuilding Iraq. (from the NYTimes, by way of the Technical Outlook blog, now appearantly abandoned)

So there you go, We've got another big job requiring skills, recources, and, probably (this is the Bush Administration), security clearances. As for short notice, well, that is perhaps debatable, but then everyone knew we were going to Iraq long before it happened, too (though I think most people didnt want to believe it).
Anyway, if the BushCorp needs an arguement that they were shortsighted in their preparedness for the possibility of hurricane damage, they can always point out this contract as proof that they had done all they needed to; they'd taken care of their friends, not some immoral city full of Democrats.