Halliburton & Cheney: Fight to Keep Wallets Fat (Rick Jacobs @ HuffPo

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It's worth pausing to recall the insidious nature of Halliburton's role in the invasion and occupation of Iraq. As with so much related to the Bush/Cheney Administration, the truth is stranger than fiction. We did not need Oliver Stone for this one; Robert Greenwald's fact-based documentary tells it better than any novelist could imagine.

We all by now know that Dick Cheney retired from the Pentagon in 1993 to accede to the thrown of Halliburton, an oil field services company based in Houston. Under Mr. Cheney's reign, Halliburton acquired Dresser Industries which included the Kellogg Company (the K of KBR), a major engineering firm. True to form, Mr. Cheney's acquisition did not include much due diligence. After Mr. Cheney left Halliburton with tens of millions of dollars in his pocket largely earned because of his connections to Middle East dictators, Halliburton had to cough up $2.3 billion in cash, about $1.2 billion in stock and another $55 million in IOUs to help pay off the tens of thousands of people in this country who had suffered and/or died of asbestos poisoning at the hand of Dresser, which Mr. Cheney had acquired and for which Mr. Cheney was (and apparently still is) handsomely compensated. If this sounds a bit like Mr. Cheney's due diligence with respect to weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, it should. He never bothered to look at what Dresser had before he bought it for Halliburton and he never bothered to look at what Iraq had before he broke it for the U.S.

As Messrs. Cheney and Rumsfeld planned the war in Iraq beginning during the first year of the Bush Administration, Mr. Cheney's Halliburton was the contractor of choice to do the work that the military had always done in past wars. This time, though, the war would be privatized to suit the ideology and obfuscation of the Bush team, which wanted to pretend that the number of people we'd need in Iraq would be small (so outsource it) and that the government can be privatized (so outsource it to friends).

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It's clear why Halliburton CEO David Lesar and his hyperbole machine attacked Iraq for Sale on Friday without even seeing it. On Monday, 18 September in Washington, Senator Dorgan, a crusader for truth and oversight of companies such as Halliburton, together with Senators Reid and Bingaman, is holding hearings with four witnesses from the film who will talk about the "Friday Massacre." The senators know that Halliburton has been profiteering at the expense of taxpayers, soldiers and its own employees. Mr. Lesar is scared that finally, with a film that everyone can see and hearings that everyone will watch, his reliance on the federal trough may come to an unhappy end. Having looked across town at his former Enron neighbors, even Mr. Lesar has to remember the old Wall Street adage: Bulls have their day. Bears have their day. But pigs always get slaughtered.

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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rick-jacobs/halliburton-and-cheney-_b_29635.html

Meeting
Iraq Contracting
Senate Democratic Policy Committee
Washington, District of Columbia (United States)
ID: 194341 - 09/18/2006 - 2:00 - ns

Leahy, Patrick J. U.S. Senator, D-VT
Reid, Harry U.S. Senator, D-NV
Dorgan, Byron L. U.S. Senator, D-ND

The Senate Democratic Policy Committee holds an oversight hearing on waste, fraud, and abuse in U.S. government contracting in Iraq.

On C-SPAN 3 @ 2pm EDT Today
http://www.c-span.org /