Iraq Contractor Shakeup

A sort of good news/bad news thing. The good news is that Kellog, Brown, and Root (KBR) -- a Halliburton subsidiary who have really, really sucked -- is losing the exclusivity to its contract.

The bad news is that it looks like it'll result in even less oversight, aggravating an already corrupt system of contractor funding.

clipped from www.nytimes.com For the first time since the war began, the largest single Pentagon contract in Iraq is being divided among three companies, ending the monopoly held by KBR, the Houston-based corporation that has been accused of wasteful spending and mismanagement and of exploiting its political ties to Vice President Dick Cheney. Yet even as the Pentagon begins to pull apart the enormous KBR contract, critics warn that the new three-company deal could actually result in higher costs for American taxpayers and weak oversight by the military. In fact, under the new deal, KBR and the two other companies could actually make more than three times as much as KBR has been paid each year since the war began.