Gareth, as you dump on Bobert and his West Virginny slide rule, I can't follow your line of thinking. In the meantime,

Background.

Excerpts from just released article in the Washington Post:

WASHINGTON — Defense Department auditors have discovered that a Halliburton subsidiary may have overcharged the government $61 million on a contract to supply fuel for Iraq, a Pentagon official said yesterday. In another contract to operate U.S. military mess halls, Halliburton, which was headed by Dick Cheney before he became vice president, would have been overpaid $67 million if auditors hadn't questioned the arrangement, officials said, citing findings of a draft audit.
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On the gas contract, Halliburton subsidiary KBR (Kellogg, Brown & Root), has been charging the U.S. government $2.27 a gallon to deliver gasoline from Kuwait, while another similar contract for gas from Turkey is charging only $1.18, the official said . . . On the contract to operate mess halls, the official said that Halliburton told the Pentagon its subcontractor price would be $220 million. But auditors examining Halliburton's operations found that at that time, the company already had awarded a subcontract under which the cost was actually $67 million lower than that.
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Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., who has taken the lead in questioning the Halliburton contracts, said in a statement that the draft report "confirms what we've known for months. Halliburton has been gouging taxpayers and the White House has been letting them get away with it."
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Cheney was defense secretary from 1989 until 1993, and then was chief executive at Halliburton from 1995 until 2000, when he resigned to join George W. Bush on the 2000 Republican ticket. The two contracts in question are among the biggest the U.S. government has let for operations in postwar Iraq. They are open-ended arrangements under which about $5 billion has been spent so far, one of the Pentagon officials said.

Still listening to the radio. Rumsfeld just came on with a sound-bite about the Halliburton audit and he's dancing as fast as he can, but he ain't no Fred Astaire.

Don Firth