Empire of Oil

By Restless [Originally on goofyblog 5.10.07]

Camp Bondsteel, the biggest “from scratch” foreign US military base since the Vietnam War is near completion in the Yugoslav province of Kosovo. It is located close to vital oil pipelines and energy corridors presently under construction, such as the US sponsored Trans-Balkan oil pipeline. As a result defence contractors—in particular Halliburton Oil subsidiary Brown & Root Services—are making a fortune.

Paul Stuart
29 April 2002

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the private military contractors?

CHALMERS JOHNSON: It’s a business that’s developed, above all, in the 1990’s. It was Cheney’s idea when he was Secretary of Defense in the first Bush administration — that allegedly, to save money, they were going to start privatizing numerous activities in the armed forces that, until then, were performed by soldiers on active duty.

This — He sent out a contract to the Brown & Root division of Halliburton — a very famous old company that bankrolled the lives of Lyndon Johnson and many other famous Texas politicians.

He gave a contract to Brown & Root to estimate how they might start privatizing the various activities in the armed forces. Then he turned around and gave Brown & Root the contract to carry out their plan and as he left the government at the end of the Bush administration, Cheney went on a couple of years late to become the president of Halliburton, which is the company that owns Brown & Root.

Basically it means today that a soldier in the armed forces doesn’t have any of those experiences that were present there in World War II or Korean or Vietnamese wars.

People don’t do guard duty. They don’t clean up the barracks. They don’t clean the latrines. They don’t do kitchen police, so-called K.P.

That’s all done for them by private contractors. It is extremely lucrative and the way the contracts are written, profits are guaranteed. It is impossible to lose on these things.

Perhaps the greatest example is camp Bondsteel in Kosovo in the Balkans, which is the most expensive base that we’ve built since the Vietnam war. It was built entirely by Brown & Root.

It is today operated for the government by Brown & Root, just as are the bases in Kyrzakstan, in Turkey, and many other places of that sort. It is a huge growing business.

– Interview of Chalmers Johnson by Amy Goodman of DemocracyNow, October 2003