 were less willing to wait in the ever-lengthening lines as the gas crisis worsened. The black marketers took their plastic jugs to the petrol stations, filled them, walked down the street a few meters and used siphons and plastic funnels to pour gas into the empty tanks of those able to pay a little extra. Everyone from small children to elderly men on crutches were doing this. Meanwhile, short-tempered Iraqis were jamming their cars toward the pumps, some having slept overnight in their cars in order to keep their place in line. And the Americans tried to tell us this war is not about our oil, yelled the man pushing his car. He agreed to talk with us as long as we stayed out of his way. Even under that bastard's sedom, we never had benzene shortages. I'd seen these lines all over Baghdad. Gas lines were so thick in some areas that traffic would often get choked down to a single lane, further aggravating the already impossible chaos of Baghdad's auto congestion. Some of the men we spoke with in the fuel line were aware of the fact that Haliburton subsidiary KVR had just been talked by the Pentagon for grossly overcharging them by importing gasoline into Iraq from Kuwait at $2.65 per gallon. Iraqi concerns were able to do the job for under $1 per gallon. Haliburton, which had Dick Cheney as its chairman and CEO from 1995 to 2000, before he relinquished his position in order to become Vice President of the United States, was unabashedly looting the Pentagon. By this time, Cheney's old company, which he still had financial ties with and has, had obtained billions of dollars of contracts in Iraq. No one knows exactly how much money has been contracted in total, but as of the time of this writing, Haliburton's overall contracts for a log cap and oil infrastructure rebuilding in total approximately $20 billion in Iraq. Total expenditures on U.S. corporations operating in Iraq on reconstruction and other services is about $50 billion. Log cap is a logistic civil augmentation program with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which is Haliburton's largest government contract. Under this contract, Haliburton is responsible for providing supplies and services to the U.S. military on a global basis. Services include construction and military housing for troops, transporting food and supplies to bases, and serving food. So, pause. According to the Department of Defense, there's over 736 U.S. military bases around the planet. Haliburton has the contract of supplying, doing construction on, and servicing all of those U.S. military bases around the globe. It's a pretty sweet deal. It's worth noting that it was Dick Cheney as defense secretary in 1992, who spearheaded the movement to privatize most of the military's civil logistics activities. Under Cheney's direction, $9 million was paid by the Pentagon to KBR to conduct a study to determine whether private companies like KBR should handle all the military's civil logistics. That's in the club, too. KBR's classified study conveniently concluded that greater privatization of logistics was in the government's best interest. Big shocker. Shortly thereafter, on August 3rd, 1992, Secretary Cheney awarded the first comprehensive log cap contract to KBR. The Washington Post reported at the time, quote, the Pentagon chose KBR to carry out the study and subsequently selected the company to implement its own plan. Three years later, Cheney became CEO of Haliburton. And then to finish the linear progression, so he remained CEO of Haliburton up until 1999, when George Bush announces he's going to run for president of the United States. And a committee, clearly, needs to be formed as is how it goes in the United States in order to try to decide and choose, OK, who's going to be his running mate? Who's going to be his vice president? So Cheney volunteers to chair that committee, and then he chooses himself. And then, literally, the day before he's sworn in as vice president, he steps out of his CEO position. And then the next day, he's sworn in as vice president. And here we are. I think that's pretty clear. To a quick update on that, former Haliburton subsidiary KBR has received so far now contracts in Iraq totaling well over $20 billion. In a Pentagon audit of $16.2 billion worth of KBR's work found that at least $3.2 billion in KBR billing was either questionable or completely unsupported by documentation. Another big shocker. I want to leave plenty of time for question and answer session, so I do want to start closing up. But I want to talk a little bit about why there's so much violence in Iraq, particularly coming from the US military, and why US soldiers have done so many of the things like the Abu Ghraibs, the Hadithas, the Fallujahs. Why is this happening? And I actually close my book. I think it's an important question, because it's something that's going to be ongoing for, well, an indefinite period of time right now. And it is going to get worse in time. And I decided to, I had met a man named Robert J. Lifton. He lives in Boston. He's a famous psychiatrist, because he had done studies. He became very interested in trying to figure out how is it possible for one human being to carry out atrocities on another human being? And for example, he did studies. I mean, he's done volumes of studies. But he did studies on Hitler's SS after World War II to try to figure out how could a human being, ideology or not, how could a human being put another human being in an oven and burn them alive? How can that happen? And he wanted to figure out psychologically how does a human being do that? How does he get to the stage of doing that? And then he did similar studies during and after the Vietnam War for the United States, military. He would interview troops coming back home, because it was not uncommon in the US that literally similar to Iraq, guys would be walking in the jungle on patrol one day. And two days later, he'd be showing up at San Francisco Airport and walking around the streets of San Francisco. And it became common, especially in the latter years of Vietnam, for troops to come home. I mean, it was such an atrocity producing situation. That's what Lyfton labeled it, that they would come home and they'd become so normalized to that type of situation that they would come home with necklaces of tears that they had cut off of Vietnamese resistance fighters or carrying digits of their fingers in their pockets as war trophies and this kind of thing. And so again, Lyfton tried to figure out how can people do this to other human beings? Ideology or not, how can this happen? And a lot of his work actually ended up playing a very heavy role in updating what was formerly called shell shock into post-traumatic stress disorder. A lot of that's thanks to Robert J Lyfton. I mean, this is an individual that absolutely knows what he's talking about. And so when he saw the Hadithas and the other graves and things like that coming out of Iraq, he again started writing about it and researching what was happening. And so in order to not dehumanize American soldiers or try to paint them as the bad guy or something like that, I thought it was very important to include this in the book and also because it was something that I experienced myself as well. And in an article titled, Conditions of Atrocity,