US Company That Built Guantánamo Hopes to Win Tender to Run Police Services in UK
Yesterday, the Guardian reported the extraordinary story that KBR (Kellogg, Brown & Root), the Texas-based former subsidiary of the Halliburton corporation (of which former US Vice President Dick Cheney was the CEO), is part of a consortium that has made it through to the final shortlist for a £1.5bn contract to “run key policing services in the West Midlands and Surrey.”
KBR, which was sold by Halliburton in 2007, was involved in building the Bush administration’s reviled “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay, and “was still part of Halliburton when it won a large share of Pentagon contracts to build and manage US military bases in Iraq after the 2003 invasion.”
When the “police privatisation” plan was first touted in two months ago, the Guardian explained that “[p]rivate companies could take responsibility for investigating crimes, patrolling neighbourhoods and even detaining suspects” under the radical privatisation plan being put forward by West Midlands and Surrey, “two of the largest police forces in the country,” who had “invited bids from G4S and other major security companies on behalf of all forces across England and Wales to take over the delivery of a wide range of services previously carried out by the police.” Read the rest of this entry »
