PNAC member of the week: Dick Cheney

[POAC]

http://www.oldamericancentury.org/pnacmemberoftheweek.htm
(original contains internal links)

Cheney went to Washington in 1969 to serve as special assistant to (fellow PNAC member) Donald Rumsfeld in the Office of Economic Opportunity in the Nixon administration.

Since he and Bush arrived at the White House, Cheney has managed to accomplish quite a bit. He's met with the heads of oil, gas, and nuclear power companies, assembled their "wish lists," and turned them into a new national Energy Plan. Cheney's close relations with folks like Ken Lay of Enron have made this one of the most corporation-friendly administrations in history.

Mr. Cheney led Halliburton into the top ranks of corporate welfare hogs, benefiting from almost $2 billion in taxpayer-insured loans from the U.S. Export-Import Bank and the Overseas Private Investment Corp. In the five years before Mr. Cheney joined the company, it got a measly $100 million in government loans." (1)

Cheney in numbers:
Cheney's 2000 income from Halliburton: $36,086,635

Increase in government contracts while Cheney led Halliburton: 91%
Minimum size of "accounting irregularity" that occurred while Cheney was CEO: $100,000,000 (One hundred MILLION dollars)

Number of the seven official US "State Sponsors of Terror" that Halliburton contracted with: 2 out of 7

Pages of Energy Plan documents Cheney refused to give congressional investigators: 13,500

Amount energy companies gave the Bush/Cheney presidential campaign: $1,800,000


In a debate with Vice Presidential candidate Joe Lieberman in 2000, Lieberman noted that Cheney had done well for himself as CEO of Halliburton. Cheney responded flatly, "I can tell you, Joe, the government had absolutely nothing to do with it." But even a glance at Cheney's tenure at Halliburton suggests otherwise.

During his five years as CEO, Cheney nearly doubled the size of Halliburton's government contracts, totaling a whopping $2.3 billion. He convinced the Export-Import Bank of the U.S. to lend Halliburton and oil companies another $1.5 billion, backed by U.S. taxpayers. As exposed in the article below, some of these loans went to a Russian company with ties to drug dealing and organized crime. (2)

Cheney's rule at Halliburton was characterized by a ruthless geopolitical strategy that put aside political beliefs whenever they were inconvenient. In a number of cases, Halliburton and its subsidiaries supported or even ordered human rights violations and broke international laws. Consider the following examples:

* Libyan dictator and suspected anti-U.S. terrorist Moammar Gadhafi engaged a foreign subsidiary of Halliburton company Brown & Root to perform millions of dollars worth of work. According to the Baltimore Sun, Brown & Root was fined $3.8 million for violating Libyan sanctions. (Although Cheney wasn't leading Halliburton when these sales started, subsidiaries' sales to Libya continued throughout his tenure.)

* Cheney claimed that he supported the U.S. sanctions on Iraq, but the Financial Times of London reported that through foreign subsidiaries and affiliates, Halliburton became the biggest oil contractor for Iraq, selling more than $73 million in goods and services to Saddam Hussein's regime. (3)

* In Burma, Halliburton joined oil companies in working on two notorious gas pipelines, the Yadana and Yetagun. According to an Earth Rights report, "From 1992 until the present, thousands of villagers in Burma were forced to work in support of these pipelines and related infrastructure, lost their homes due to forced relocation, and were raped, tortured and killed by soldiers hired by the companies as security guards for the pipelines. One of Halliburton’s projects was undertaken during Dick Cheney’s tenure as CEO." (The full report is linked to below.)

Halliburton is now being investigated by the Securities and Exchange Commission for Enron-style accounting practices that took place while Cheney was CEO.

In late August 2001, a Los Angeles Times article exposed the connections between Cheney's Task Force and Bush's campaign contributors. The article described how the final report adopted verbatim a global warming policy suggested by the U.S. Energy Association (an energy industry group), how language was altered to favor Halliburton, and how a company called Peabody Coal and its affiliates gave more than $900,000 to the Bush campaign and "gained extraordinary access" to the Task Force. (4)

While the mainstream media mostly continue to cast Bush as the captain of his ship, hints that Cheney is the dominant figure shaping Washington's diplomatic policy have become too numerous to ignore. A recent Washington Post article revealed a most stunning example of this lopsided state of affairs. According to the Post, Bush had ordered Cabinet officials not to give any preferential treatment to Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress (INC) when U.S. forces moved into Iraq last spring. But soon after, in flagrant violation of his directive, the Pentagon flew Chalabi and 600 of his armed followers into southern Iraq in early April, "with the approval of the vice president." That was the crowd you saw cheering in the statue toppling photo-op.

It was Cheney's choices that prevailed in the appointment of both cabinet and sub-cabinet national-security officials, beginning with that of (PNAC member) Donald Rumsfeld as Defense Secretary. Not only did Cheney personally intervene to ensure that Powell's best friend, (PNAC member) Richard Armitage, was denied the deputy defense secretary position, but he also secured the post for his own protege, (PNACmember) Paul Wolfowitz. Moreover, it was Cheney who insisted that the ultra-unilateralist (PNAC co-founder) John Bolton be placed in a top State Department arms job – a position from which Bolton has consistently pursued policies that run counter to Powell's own views.
Cheney's chief of staff and national security adviser, (PNAC member)I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, a Washington lawyer and Wolfowitz protege, is considered a far more skilled and experienced bureaucratic and political operator than Rice. With several of his political allies on Rice's own staff – , including deputy national security adviser Stephen Hadley and Middle East director (PNAC member) Elliott Abrams – Libby "is able to run circles around Condi," noted a former NSC official .

According to retired intelligence officers, Cheney and Libby played the decisive role in distorting the intelligence used to make Bush's case for war. Libby made frequent trips to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in the run-up to the Iraq war, pressuring analysts in include questionable evidence supplied by the INC and Rumsfeld-led hawks.

More recently, it was Cheney who led the effort to deny Powell the authority to negotiate a new UN Security Council resolution that would have reduced the Pentagon's control over the political transition in Iraq, even though the president initially approved such a deal.

For an extensive briefing on Halliburton and Cheney's foreign policy impact, check out this well-written and thorough report (5)
Cheney made $36 million at Halliburton in 2000 alone. Thesmokinggun.com has his tax returns to prove it (6)


(1) http://www.commondreams.org/views02/0610-03.htm
(2) http://www.public-i.org/story_01_080200.htm
(3) http://gwbush.com/spots/postpage.html
(4) http://www.commondreams.org/headlines01/0826-02.htm
(5) http://www.earthrights.org/halliburton/report.pdf
(6) http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/dicktax1.shtml

More:
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/30/business/30HALL.html
http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0882164.html
http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=17051
http://www.corpwatch.org/issues/PID.jsp?articleid=2469
http://www.moveon.org/moveonbulletin/bulletin1.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/30/business/30HALL.html

Archived PNAC Members of the week:

Elliott Abrams
William Bennett
Jeb Bush
Dick Cheney
William Kristol
Richard Perle
Karl Rove
Donald Rumsfeld