Taking that definition, PolitiFact is essentially affirming what Huffington said as “accurate” and, in its analysis, providing the “important details,” “context,” and nuance she could not get out on a Sunday morning news show. In their words:
In ruling on Huffington’s statement, we find much in the public record to support her statement, most notably the Justice Department lawsuit. Certainly there have been hundreds of millions of dollars that Halliburton’s KBR attempted to charge the government that have been denied. Government audits of KBR’s work in Iraq will likely continue for some time, and we do not expect a final accounting on these fronts anytime soon. Huffington glossed over some of these points in her back and forth with Liz Cheney. There’s also much evidence that makes us believe that hundreds of millions of dollars were lost to waste and inefficiency, not deceitful fraud. So we rate Huffington’s statement Half True.
PolitiFact’s handling of the situation was exemplary, the site acting with the transparency befitting an organization positioning itself as a kind of truth police. In fact, it was the publication of three letters supporting Huffington and criticizing PolitiFact’s verdict on PolitiFact’s own “Mailbag” page that inspired Huffington to write on the issue a month after the Half True rating had been published.
PolitiFact editor Bill Adair commented on Huffington’s piece on Media Bistro’s FishbowlDC.
“I respect Arianna’s right to disagree with us, but I think we got it right,” Adair told FishbowlDC in an e-mail. “We spent several days researching her statement and found that while there was the overbilling she cites, there wasn’t clear-cut proof it was fraud. So Half True was the right call.”
Going by the parameters of PolitiFact’s Truth-o-Meter, we think it’s the right call too. A cautious call, true—read the full text of the finding and there seems to be something fishy going on with KBR—but right.
Perhaps it’s just another case of the difference between the old guard, represented here somewhat ironically by a rigorous, old-school, fact-checking Web site, and the new guard in Huffington and her Post.
Well, you can call it what you like, Bunny Greenhouse called it "blatant and improper abuse":
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/28/AR2005082800881.html
This guy called it "waste and compromised safety standards":
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QeIxHQ-lkuM
And the way they abused the cost-plus contracts by pushing empty trucks in war zones so they could bill it, blowing up trucks because of flat tires, I don't know what you'd call that.
But it wasn't very kosher, if you ask me..
#1 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Thu 8 Jul 2010 at 03:29 PM
And if you ask Alan Grayson, who cut his teeth in politics filing fraud suits against Haliburton - cases that he can't talk about in detail because of national security and the False Claims Act - he'd call it fraud:
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2007/11/halliburton200711?currentPage=all
There's a difference between a lack of admitted evidence and a lack of truth. There are ways the politifacts and be argued, but the truth is Haliburton's business, which was based on the privatized army services model set forth by Dick Cheney, which was supposed to reduce costs and improve services and did neither, stinks to high heaven. Now that might be fraud or it might be the putrefying corpses in the back of the service men ice truck again.
I don't think exploring the semantics of it does service to the greater truth.
#2 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Thu 8 Jul 2010 at 03:42 PM
From the Vanity Fair article:
"In the fall of 2006, Conyers told me he was planning to file a lawsuit against KBR under the False Claims Act, a law crafted by Abraham Lincoln to punish war profiteers. Under the act’s “qui tam,” or whistle-blowing, provisions, anyone who comes across a suspected fraud can file a suit on taxpayers’ behalf. (“Qui tam” is an abbreviation of a Latin phrase that means “He who sues for the king as well as for himself.”) If the government—in the shape of the Department of Justice—decides that the case has merit, it “intervenes,” adopting the suit as its own and bearing its costs. The original whistle-blower will get a proportion (usually about 18 percent) of the damages, which can be considerable: when qui tam cases succeed, contractors have to pay back three times as much as they stole.
A suit ordinarily remains sealed for 60 days while the D.O.J. makes up its mind about whether or not to proceed. During this period, anyone who divulged the suit’s contents—plaintiff, lawyer, or journalist—would risk prosecution, fines, and imprisonment. According to court precedents, a violation of the seal might also cause the case in question to collapse. But when the seal expires, the lawsuit’s contents are made public—whether the D.O.J. intervenes or not.
We must assume that Conyers did file his suit, because he now says he’s unable to talk at all about his experiences with KBR in Iraq. This is presumably because the case remains under seal, though neither he nor Grayson can confirm even that. The seal is, in effect, a sweeping gag order, preventing them or anyone else from discussing the case in any way. Vanity Fair is able to publish Conyers’s story only because he told it before any gag was imposed, to a writer for Hustler magazine, and to me. If he spoke about his allegations now, he could go to jail."
"He had, he says, handled a “trickle” of qui tam cases for years, representing both whistle-blowers and contractors. Many of those cases were swiftly adopted by the D.O.J. But when the Bush administration came to power and the “war on terror” began, he quickly came to realize that the scale of fraud spawned in its wake was of a different order of magnitude. More and more would-be plaintiffs began to contact his firm after hearing about it on the informal whistle-blowers’ grapevine or through nonprofit organizations such as Taxpayers Against Fraud and the Project on Government Oversight, both based in D.C. “I certainly could be doing a lot of different things in my life,” says Grayson. “It’s possible that when all is said and done on these cases I will have lost a substantial amount of money. I’m O.K. with that. Some things you do because they’re really worthwhile and important.”
It is perfectly normal, Grayson says, for the D.O.J. to seek to extend the seal on a qui tam suit for 6 or 12 months while it carries out investigations. But with many of the Iraq cases it has gone back to court time and again, successfully asking judges for extension after extension. As a result, even many suits first filed in 2003 and 2004 remain entirely secret.
“What you have here is a uniform practice that goes across an entire class of cases, something I’ve never seen before,” says Grayson. “They’re being treated in a fundamentally different way from normal cases that don’t involve fraud in Iraq. They’re being bottled up indefinitely.”
In fiscal year 2006, according to Taxpayers Against Fraud, the D.O.J. won damages in 95 separate qui tam cases in fields ranging from Medicare to homeland security, recovering a total of almost $3.2 billion. Yet not a cent of this sum arose from suits against contracting firms in Iraq. In four years, the total False Claims Act damages from Iraq amount to just $14 million, the result of four cases that were settled out of court, according to the D.O.J.
Nine other cases have been unsealed, but the D.O.J. decided not to intervene in any
#3 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Thu 8 Jul 2010 at 04:04 PM
Only half fraud, I guess:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VCozQUnOvz8
Do you get the litigation logjam by high powered lawyered Haliburton and the government who represented them?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oo0mWxgwz_k
#4 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Thu 8 Jul 2010 at 04:38 PM
Politifact always has its thumb on the scale - awarding tougher ratings to Dems and bending over backwards for the GOP, in some cases inventing scenarios out of whole cloth where a Dem might be mistaken or a GOPer *might* be correct. I don't blame them, of course, they are always under pressure from the right to fudge their ratings, and it's just easier for them to comply.
You notice they don't bother to fact-check Liz Cheney -- one of the biggest liars on the conservative circuit right now. I don't see much fact-checking of her father either. It's part of a pattern for the national media to defer to the GOP and conservatives in general, recognizing and responding to their complaints and trivializing complaints by Dems and the liberal side. Of course, part of that is fear of the brutal tactics and career-ending attacks that the GOP and conservatives wield so successfully. Part of it is that their bosses just want them to defer to the conservative side.
#5 Posted by Tom, CJR on Thu 8 Jul 2010 at 06:21 PM
This disagreement is a nice example of why Politifact will not correct the problem it intends to solve. Many times, people disagree not on the facts but on the meaning of those facts. Huffington and Politifact agree that an event occurred, Halliburton overcharged the gov't--they just disagree on the meaning of that event. Huffington says that it "proves" Halliburton defrauded the gov't. Politifact says that Halliburton hasn't been convicted of that crime yet. To Huffington, and to the community with which she interacts, that is a distinction without a difference and they will quite rightly ignore Politifact.
#6 Posted by david ryfe, CJR on Fri 9 Jul 2010 at 10:18 PM
It's completely nauseating that CJR thinks Politifact got it right. Wrong. Arianna got it right. She didn't get it "half-right." Fraud is fraud. Halliburton's subsidiary billed the government (and by extension all of us) fraudulently. End of story. Sure, an investigation continues to determine the extent of the fraud, but we should be able to agree if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it's a duck.
#7 Posted by Dan, CJR on Mon 12 Jul 2010 at 08:27 PM
The government itself called it fraud:
* The US Government brought a suit against Halliburton subsidiary KBR under the National Procurement Fraud Initiative for violations of the False Claims Act.
* Two KBR employees served time in prison after being convicted of defrauding the Department of Defense.
How is it "half true" when the government itself called it fraud? Cowardly Politifact is reluctant to tackle the really big lies, the lies of Liz Cheney and Dick Cheney. They are just nitpicking the small time stuff. It's the easy way out, to rest on their laurels, making false pronouncements on the small-time stuff.
#8 Posted by Tom, CJR on Tue 13 Jul 2010 at 12:25 AM