"Dick" Cheney Made Millions Off Oil Deals
with Saddam 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.
Halliburton was among more than a dozen American
firms that supplied Iraq's petroleum industry with spare parts and retooled
its oil rigs when U.N. sanctions were eased in 1998. Cheney's company
utilized subsidiaries in France, Italy, Germany, and Austria so as not
to draw undue attention to controversial business arrangements that might
embarrass Washington and jeopardize lucrative ties to Iraq, which will
pump $24 billion of petrol under the U.N.-administered oil-for-food program
this year. Assisted by Halliburton, Hussein's government will earn another
$1 billion by illegally exporting oil through black-market channels.
With Cheney at the helm since 1995, Halliburton
quickly grew into America's number-one oil-services company, the fifth-largest
military contractor, and the biggest nonunion employer in the nation.
Although Cheney claimed that the U.S. government "had absolutely nothing
to do" with his firm's meteoric financial success, State Department documents
obtained by the Los Angeles Times indicate that U.S. officials helped
Halliburton secure major contracts in Asia and Africa. Halliburton now
does business in 130 countries and employs more than 100,000 workers worldwide.
Its 1999 income was a cool $15 billion.
In addition to Iraq, Halliburton counts among its
business partners several brutal dictatorships that have committed egregious
human rights abuses, including the hated military regime in Burma (Myanmar).
EarthRights, a Washington, D.C.-based human rights watchdog, condemned
Halliburton for two energy-pipeline projects in Burma that led to the
forced relocation of villages, rape, murder, indentured labor, and other
crimes against humanity.
A full report (this is a 45 page pdf file - there
is also a brief summary) on the Burma connection, "Halliburton's
Destructive Engagement," can be accessed on EarthRights' Web site
Read Full Article by Martin Lee at the San Fransisco
Bay Guardian here
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And for yet more revelations on this profiteering
lying ghoul "Dick" Cheney and his corporate oil dealings with
Iraq, please see related article here at Truth
Out
