Cheney, Halliburton Helped Saddam Fleece Oil for Food Program

Bread and Circus

(1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore

Tue Oct-12-04 11:21 AM
Original message

Cheney, Halliburton Helped Saddam Fleece Oil for Food Program

Edited on Tue Oct-12-04 11:21 AM by familydoctor

I think this is both politically and ethically significant.
It should be read and understood by DU'ers in my opinion.
It's a story that got swept under the rug, but bears retrieval
at this time before a major election.

This has been locked in LBN and we were told by the mods to move the
discussion elsewhere. I've put a lot of work into finding and pasting
relevant articles, I hope it doesn't get locked again.

----- This is two publications of essentiall the same article ------

http://progressivetrail.org/articles/041011Leopold.shtml

Cheney, Halliburton Helped Saddam Fleece Oil for Food Program

by Jason Leopold

published by The Progressive Trail

Cheney, Halliburton Helped Saddam Fleece Oil for Food Program

When the Iraqi Survey Group released its long awaited report last week that said Iraq eliminated its weapons programs in the 1990s, President George W. Bush quickly changed his stance on reasons he authorized an invasion of Iraq. While he campaigned for a second term in office, Bush justified the war by saying that that Saddam Hussein was manipulating the United Nation's oil-for-food program, siphoning off billions of dollars from the venture that he intended to use to fund a weapons program.

http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0410/S00132.ht

Cheney's Halliburton Helped Saddam Siphon UN $Bns
Tuesday, 12 October 2004, 11:36 am
Article: Jason Leopold

Under Cheney, Halliburton Helped Saddam Hussein Siphon Billions from UN Oil-for-Food Program

By Jason Leopoldhttp://progressivetrail.org/articles/041011Leopold.shtml

When the Iraqi Survey Group released its long awaited report last week that said Iraq eliminated its weapons programs in the 1990s, President George W. Bush quickly changed his stance on reasons he authorized an invasion of Iraq. While he campaigned for a second term in office, Bush justified the war by saying that that Saddam Hussein was manipulating the United Nation's oil-for-food program, siphoning off billions of dollars from the venture that he intended to use to fund a weapons program.

----------

Here are more links on this, many quite interesting:

http://www.thenation.com/thebeat/index.mhtml?bid=1&pid=1892

Additionally, Cheney's old company, Halliburton, the top oil services corporation in the U.S., filled its coffers with Iraqi money during the heyday of the Oil for Food program. When Cheney's was Halliburton's CEO, the company did not collect vouchers; rather, its subsidiaries took advantage of the opening created by the "Oil-for-Food" program to cut deals with Saddam Hussein's government that allowed it to take money directly from Iraq. During 1998 and 1999, Halliburton's Dresser Rand and Ingersoll Dresser Pump subsidiaries signed contracts to provide roughtly $73 million in oil production equipment and spare parts to Iraq.

----------

http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/sanction/iraq1/oilforfood/2001/0627chen.htm

Firm's Iraq Deals Greater Than Cheney Has Said
By Colum Lynch
Washington Post
June 23, 2001

During last year's presidential campaign, Richard B. Cheney acknowledged that the oil-field supply corporation he headed, Halliburton Co., did business with Libya and Iran through foreign subsidiaries. But he insisted that he had imposed a "firm policy" against trading with Iraq.

"Iraq's different," he said.

According to oil industry executives and confidential United Nations records, however, Halliburton held stakes in two firms that signed contracts to sell more than $73 million in oil production equipment and spare parts to Iraq while Cheney was chairman and chief executive officer of the Dallas-based company.

Two former senior executives of the Halliburton subsidiaries say that, as far as they knew, there was no policy against doing business with Iraq. One of the executives also says that although he never spoke directly to Cheney about the Iraqi contracts, he is certain Cheney knew about them.

Mary Matalin, Cheney's counselor, said that if he "was ever in a conversation or meeting where there was a question of pursuing a project with someone in Iraq, he said, 'No.' "

----------

http://www.truthout.org/docs_01/02.01E.Cheney.Hussein.htm

Cheney Made Millions Off Oil Deals with Hussein
San Francisco Bay Guardian
November 13, 2000
by Martin A. Lee

Here's a whopper of a story you may have missed amid the cacophony of campaign ads and stump speeches in the run- up to the elections.

During former defense secretary Richard Cheney's five-year tenure as chief executive of Halliburton, Inc., his oil services firm raked in big bucks from dubious commercial dealings with Iraq. Cheney left Halliburton with a $34 million retirement package last July when he became the GOP's vice-presidential candidate.

Of course, U.S. firms aren't generally supposed to do business with Saddam Hussein. But thanks to legal loopholes large enough to steer an oil tanker through, Halliburton profited big-time from deals with the Iraqi dictatorship. Conducted discreetly through several Halliburton subsidiaries in Europe, these greasy transactions helped Saddam Hussein retain his grip on power while lining the pockets of Cheney and company.

According to the Financial Times of London, between September 1998 and last winter, Cheney, as CEO of Halliburton, oversaw $23.8 million of business contracts for the sale of oil-industry equipment and services to Iraq through two of its subsidiaries, Dresser Rand and Ingersoll-Dresser Pump, which helped rebuild Iraq's war-damaged petroleum-production infrastructure. The combined value of these contracts exceeded those of any other U.S. company doing business with Baghdad.

-----------

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Oil_watch/Cheney_Halliburton.html

* Iraq. Dick Cheney cites multilateral sanctions against Iraq as an example of sanctions he supports. Yet since the war, Halliburton-related companies helped to reconstruct Iraq's oil industry. In July 2000, the International Herald Tribune reported, "Dresser-Rand and Ingersoll-Dresser Pump Co., joint ventures that Halliburton has sold within the past year, have done work in Iraq on contracts for the reconstruction of Iraq's oil industry, under the United Nations' Oil for Food Program." A Halliburton spokesman acknowledged to the Tribune that the Dresser subsidiaries did sell oil-pumping equipment to Iraq via European agents.

-------------------

http://multinationalmonitor.org/mm2001/01may/may01corp10.html

Cheney & Halliburton:
Go Where the Oil Is

By Kenny Bruno and Jim Valette

Probably the most entertaining exchange in the vice-presidential debate last year occurred when Joe Lieberman, referring to the millions of dollars Dick Cheney had made as CEO of Halliburton Co., noted that Cheney was considerably “better off” than he had been eight years earlier.

Cheney, refusing to give the Clinton administration any credit for his own prosperity, or the nation’s, replied that his new wealth “had nothing to do with the government.”

The assertion was disingenuous, as in fact Halliburton’s growth and Dick Cheney’s own $37 million stock and option windfall were directly related to profits made with the help of foreign aid packages and military contracts. Cheney’s own connections from a long career in government clearly played a role in the company’s success. Moreover, the chuckling after this understated paean to private sector superiority helped to obscure the fact that Dick Cheney’s Halliburton has succeeded by partnering or engaging with governments around the world –– including some of the most repressive regimes in the world –– and its complicity with egregious human rights violations.

----------------

http://www.ccmep.org/2003_articles/Iraq/031903_cheneys_lies_about_halliburton.htm

As Bombs Drops, Hypocrisy (& Profits) Prevail
Cheney's Lies About Halliburton & Iraq

By Jason Leopold

CounterPunch

March 19, 2003

This is my last ditch effort to show the hypocrisy within President Bush's administration regarding its policies toward Iraq and its President, Saddam Hussein, just as the United States and Britain prepares to invade the country.

It was only five years ago when Vice President Dick Cheney, as chief executive of the oil-field supply corporation, Halliburton Co., was engaged in secret business dealings with Saddam's regime by selling Iraq oil production equipment and spare parts to get the Iraqi oil fields up and running, according to confidential United Nations records.

During the 2000 presidential campaign, Cheney adamantly denied such dealings. While he acknowledged that his company did business with Libya and Iran through foreign subsidiaries, Cheney said, "Iraq's different." He claimed that he imposed a "firm policy" prohibiting any unit of Halliburton against trading with Iraq.

"I had a firm policy that we wouldn't do anything in Iraq, even arrangements that were supposedly legal," Cheney said on the ABC-TV news program "This Week" on July 30, 2000. "We've not done any business in Iraq since U.N. sanctions were imposed on Iraq in 1990, and I had a standing policy that I wouldn't do that."

---------------------

http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2001/6/24/80648.shtml

Halliburton Iraq ties more than Cheney said

NewsMax Wires
Monday, June 25, 2001

UNITED NATIONS, June 23 (UPI) -- Halliburton Co., the oil company that was headed by Vice President Dick Cheney, signed contracts with Iraq worth $73 million through two subsidiaries while he was at its helm, the Washington Post reported.

During last year's presidential campaign, Cheney said Halliburton did business with Libya and Iran through foreign subsidiaries, but maintained he had imposed a "firm policy" against trading with Iraq.

"Iraq's different," the Post quoted him as saying.

Oil industry executives and confidential U.N. records showed, however, that Halliburton held stakes in two companies that signed contracts to sell more than $73 million in oil production equipment and spare parts to Iraq while Cheney was chairman and chief executive officer, the Post reported.

Two former senior executives of the Halliburton subsidiaries said they knew of no policy against dealing with Iraq. One of them said he was certain Cheney knew about the deals, though he had never spoken about them to the vice president directly.

----------------

http://blog.johnkerry.com/rapidresponse/archives/003180.html

While Cheney Was CEO, Halliburton Partnered With French Company to Do Over $70 Million In Business With Saddam Under Oil-For-Food. Under Cheney’s leadership, Halliburton acquired two subsidiaries which had signed contracts to sell oil production equipment to Iraq under the oil-for-food program. The subsidiaries “sold water and sewage treatment pumps, spare parts for oil facilities and pipeline equipment to Baghdad through French affiliates from the first half of 1997 to the summer of 2000, U.N. records show.” Halliburton made more than $73 million in deals with Saddam.

Cheney Claimed That Halliburton Divested Interests In Iraq, But Divestiture Happened After Company Made Nearly $30 Million. Responding to questions about the conflicting statements he made concerning Halliburton’s business practices in Iraq, Cheney said Halliburton divested itself of those interests. Halliburton, however, did not divest itself of those companies doing business in Iraq for more than a year under Cheney and after signing nearly $30 million in contracts in Iraq.

----------

http://www.greenleft.org.au/back/2004/584/584p14.htm

In November 2000, the San Francisco Bay Guardian reported that while Dick Cheney was its CEO, the Halliburton oil services company engaged in illegal business dealings with Saddam Hussein’s regime under the UN oil-for-food program, and assisted his regime to earn an extra $1 billion that year through selling oil on the black market.

These deals were being carried out by Halliburton at the same time as Cheney and his associates in the Project for a New American Century — Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith and Luti — were lobbying the Clinton administration to invade Iraq and open the way to US oil companies plundering Iraq’s huge oil resources.

“Most American companies were blacklisted ”, a UN diplomat with the oil-for-food program told the February 16 New Yorker magazine. “It’s rather surprising to find Halliburton doing business with Saddam. It would have been very much a senior-level decision, made by the regime at the top.”

--------------

http://www.arabia.com/business/article/english/0,,50047,00.html

Cheney oil firm had extensive Iraq dealings
The US Vice President had offered contradictory accounts of how much he knew about his company's dealings with Iraq
June 24, 2001, 08:11 AM
WASHINGTON (Reuters)
- The oilfield services company Dick Cheney headed before he became US vice president had far more extensive financial dealings with Iraq than Cheney has acknowledged, The Washington Post reported on Saturday.
G.W.Bush, Dick Cheney
The Oil Men

Citing UN records and oil industry executives, the newspaper said two subsidiaries of Halliburton Co. had contracts to sell $73 million dollars in oil production equipment and spare parts to Iraq while Cheney was chairman and CEO of the Dallas-based company.

The newspaper said, according to UN records, the subsidiaries, Dresser-Rand and Ingersoll Dresser Pump Co., sold material to Baghdad through French affiliates from the first half of 1997 to the summer of 2000. Cheney resigned as chairman of Halliburton in August.

Halliburton's dealings with Iraq were first reported last year. But the Post said UN records it recently obtained show the business was more extensive than originally reported or acknowledged by the vice president.

Cheney's spokeswoman, Juleanna Glover Weiss, said the two companies were joint ventures operated by Dresser at the time it was taken over by Halliburton, and Halliburton sold the units "as soon as it was legally feasible." "The vice president never wanted any companies under his control to do business with Iraq, even if that business was allowed under the oil-for-food program," Weiss told Reuters.

------------

http://www.independent-media.tv/item.cfm?fmedia_id=3617&fcategory_desc=Dick%20Cheney%20and%20Halliburton

Paying Halliburton instead of buying food for the Iraqi poor

''Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif) and and Rep. John Dingell (D) also said last week that the UN oil-for-food program was being used to pay Halliburton, in possible violation of a UN Security Council resolution.''

-------------

http://www.progressivetrail.org/articles/031220Ivins.shtml

Speaking of marvels of hypocrisy, the U.N.'s books on who dealt with Iraq are not all that shrouded. For example, one of the disgusting companies actually making profits from dealing with the despicable dictator in the 1990s -- long after his depravities had become evident to even the less attentive sectors of the world -- was, well, golly, look at this, Halliburton. Between 1997 and 2000, while Dick Cheney was CEO of Halliburton, the company sold $73 million worth of oilfield equipment and services to Saddam Hussein.

At least Halliburton was not selling luxury cars to the Baathist elite. Halliburton, the oilfield equipment company, merely kept Saddam Hussein's oil fields pumping, the only thing that allowed the s.o.b. to stay in power. Halliburton cleverly ran its business with Saddam through two of its subsidiaries, Dresser Rand and Ingersoll-Dresser, in order to avoid the sanctions.

Unlike the Germans, the French and the Russians, Halliburton was not punished by the Bush administration for dealing with the dictator. Instead, it got the largest reconstruction contract given by this administration, with an estimated value between $5 billion and $15 billion. And the company got the contract without competitive bidding.

---------

Though unrelated, this just tops the cake:

http://www.tompaine.com/feature2.cfm/ID/8466

Operation Oil Immunity

Steve Kretzmann and Jim Vallette are analysts with the Sustainable Energy & Economy Network of the Institute for Policy Studies.

During the initial assault on Baghdad, soldiers set up forward bases named Camp Shell and Camp Exxon. Those soldiers knew the score, even if the Pentagon's talking points dismissed any ties between Iraqi oil and their blood.

The Bush/Cheney administration has moved quickly to ensure U.S. corporate control over Iraqi resources, at least through the year 2007. The first part of the plan, created by the United Nations under U.S. pressure, is the Development Fund for Iraq, which is being controlled by the United States and advised by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The second is a recent Bush executive order that provides absolute legal protection for U.S. interests in Iraqi oil.

In May, the U.N. Security Council unanimously adopted Resolution 1483, which ended sanctions and endorsed the creation of Development Fund for Iraq, to be controlled by Paul Bremer and overseen by a board of accountants, including U.N., World Bank and IMF representatives. It endorsed the transfer of over $1 billion (of Iraqi oil money) from the Oil-for-Food program into the Development Fund. All proceeds from the sale of Iraqi oil and natural gas are also to be placed into the fund.

In the creation and expected implementation of this Development Fund for Iraq, one find....

----------

Well anyway, that was a lot of work. There's alot more but I couldn't post it all.