- AUSTIN, Texas -- Excuse me:
I don't want to be tacky or anything, but hasn't it occurred to anyone
in Washington that sending Vice President Dick Cheney out to champion an
invasion of Iraq on the grounds that Saddam Hussein is a "murderous
dictator'' is somewhere between bad taste and flaming hypocrisy?
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- When Dick Cheney was CEO of the oilfield supply firm
Halliburton, the company did $23.8 million in business with Saddam Hussein,
the evildoer ``prepared to share his weapons of mass destruction with terrorists.''
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- So, if Saddam is "the world's worst leader,'' how
come Cheney sold him the equipment to get his dilapidated oil fields up
and running so he could afford to build weapons of mass destruction?
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- In 1998, the United Nations passed a resolution allowing
Iraq to buy spare parts for its oilfields, but other sanctions remained
in place, and the United States has consistently pressured the U.N. to
stop exports of medicine and other needed supplies on the grounds they
could have ``dual use.'' As the former secretary of Defense under Bush
the Elder, Cheney was in a particularly vulnerable position on the hypocrisy
of doing business with Iraq. (Although in 1991, after the Gulf War, Cheney
told a group of oil industry executives he was emphatically against trying
to topple Hussein.)
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- Using two subsidiaries, Dresser-Rand and Ingersoll-Dresser,
Halliburton helped rebuild Saddam's war-damaged oil fields. The combined
value of these contracts for parts and equipment was greater than that
of any other American company doing business with Iraq -- companies including
Schlumberger, Flowserve, Fisher-Rosemount and General Electric. They acted
through foreign subsidiaries or associated companies in France, Belgium,
Germany, India, Switzerland, Bahrain, Egypt and the Netherlands.
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- When Cheney left Halliburton, he received a $34 million
severance package despite the fact that the single biggest deal of his
five-year career there, the acquisition of Dresser Industries, turned out
to be a huge blunder since the company came saddled with asbestos liability.
(On the campaign trail, Cheney often claimed he had been ``out in the private
sector creating jobs.'' The first thing he did after the Dresser merger
was lay off 10,000 people.)
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- Halliburton, America's No. 1 oil-services company, is
the nation's fifth-largest military contractor and the biggest nonunion
employer in the United States. It employs more than 100,000 workers worldwide
and does more than $15 billion a year. Halliburton under Cheney dealt with
several brutal dictatorships, including the despicable government of Burma
(Myanmar). The company also played questionable roles in Algeria, Angola,
Bosnia, Croatia, Haiti, Somalia and Indonesia.
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- Halliburton also had dealings with Iran and Libya, both
on the State Department's list of terrorist states. Halliburton's subsidiary
Brown & Root, the old Texas construction firm that does much business
with the U.S. military, was fined $3.8 million for re-exporting goods to
Libya in violation of U.S. sanctions.
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- If you want to know why the Democrats didn't jump all
over this story and make a big deal out of it, it's because -- as usual
-- Democrats are involved in similar dealings. Former CIA director John
Deutsch is on the board of Schlumberger, the second largest oil services
firm after Halliburton, which is also doing business with Iraq through
subsidiaries.
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- Americans have long been aware that corporate money has
consistently corrupted domestic policy in favor of corporate interests,
and that both parties are in thrall to huge corporate campaign donors.
We are less accustomed to connecting the dots when it comes to foreign
policy. But there is no more evidence that corporations pay attention to
anything other than profits in their foreign dealings than they do in their
domestic deals.
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- Enron, as usual, provides some textbook examples of just
how indifferent to human rights American companies can be. Halliburton's
dealings in Nigeria, in partnership with Shell and Chevron, provide another
such example, including gross violations of human rights and environmental
abuses.
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- No one is ever going to argue that Saddam Hussein is
a good guy, but Dick Cheney is not the right man to make the case against
him. I have never understood why the Washington press corps cannot remember
anything for longer than 10 minutes, but hearing Cheney denounce Saddam
is truly "Give us a break'' time.
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- http://www.journalstar.com/opinion.php?story_id=20310
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