- Here is a story dated June 23, 2001. I guess the
"Axis of Evil" extends right to the White House, eh? I am sending this
to the major news organizations as well as some other select sites. As
Curtis of MSNBC's "Curtis and Kuby" would say, lets see who has the
"onions" to report the truth. How about you FOX? I'd love to decide
for myself if you dare to report on this story. Where's Geraldo at?
CNN, how about you?
-
- I guess I know now who's funding these arab
'terrorists" as well as destroying 10's of 1000's of american families
by stealing their pension funds. Is there any wonder 95 percent of
Americans want these corporate criminals locked up for good? We can
see it, why are you so blind?
-
- P.S. Apparently ABC and CBS don't want to provide a
simple mailto link. Their loss.
-
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Firm's Iraq Deals Greater Than Cheney Has
Said
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By Colum Lynch
WashingtonPost.com
June
23, 2001
From GlobalPolicy.org
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- 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.' "
-
- "In a joint venture, he would not have reviewed all
their existing contracts," Matalin said. "The nature of those joint
ventures was that they had a separate governing structure, so he had
no control over them."
-
- The trade was perfectly legal. Indeed, it is a case
study of how U.S. firms routinely use foreign subsidiaries and joint
ventures to avoid the opprobrium of doing business with Baghdad, which
does not violate U.S. law as long as it occurs within the
"oil-for-food" program run by the United Nations.
-
- Halliburton's trade with Iraq was first reported by
The Washington Post in February 2000. But U.N. records recently
obtained by The Post show that the dealings were more extensive than
originally reported and than Vice President Cheney has
acknowledged.
-
- As secretary of defense in the first Bush
administration, Cheney helped to lead a multinational coalition
against Iraq in the Persian Gulf War and to devise a comprehensive
economic embargo to isolate Saddam Hussein's government. After Cheney
was named in 1995 to head Halliburton, he promised to maintain a hard
line against Baghdad.
-
- But in 1998, Cheney oversaw Halliburton's
acquisition of Dresser Industries Inc., which exported equipment to
Iraq through two subsidiaries of a joint venture with another large
U.S. equipment maker, Ingersoll-Rand Co.
-
- The subsidiaries, Dresser-Rand and Ingersoll Dresser
Pump Co., 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.
Ingersoll Dresser Pump also signed contracts -- later blocked by the
United States -- to help repair an Iraqi oil terminal that U.S.-led
military forces destroyed in the Gulf War.
-
- Former executives at the subsidiaries said they had
never heard objections -- from Cheney or any other Halliburton
official -- to trading with Baghdad. "Halliburton and Ingersoll-Rand,
as far as I know, had no official policy about that, other than we
would be in compliance with applicable U.S. and international laws,"
said Cleive Dumas, who oversaw Ingersoll Dresser Pump's business in
the Middle East, including Iraq.
-
- Halliburton's primary concern, added
Ingersoll-Rand's former chairman, James E. Perrella, "was that if we
did business with [the Iraqi regime], that it be allowed by the United
States government. If it wasn't allowed, we wouldn't do it."
-
- Dumas and Perrella said their companies' commercial
links to the Iraqi oil industry began before the U.N. Security Council
imposed an oil embargo on Baghdad in the wake of its 1990 invasion of
Kuwait.
-
- They returned to dealing with Iraq after the council
established the "oil-for-food" program in December 1996, permitting
Iraq to export oil under U.N. supervision and use the proceeds to buy
food, medicine and humanitarian goods. The program was expanded in
1998 to allow Iraq to import spare parts for its oil
facilities.
-
- The Halliburton subsidiaries joined dozens of
American and foreign oil supply companies that helped Iraq increase
its crude exports from $4 billion in 1997 to nearly $18 billion in
2000. Since the program began, Iraq has exported oil worth more than
$40 billion.
-
- The proceeds funded a sharp increase in the
country's nutritional standards, nearly doubling the food rations
distributed to Iraq's poor.
-
- But U.S. and European officials acknowledged that
the expanded production also increased Saddam Hussein's capacity to
siphon off money for weapons, luxury goods and palaces. Security
Council diplomats estimate that Iraq may be skimming off as much as 10
percent of the proceeds from the oil-for-food program.
-
- Cheney has offered contradictory accounts of how
much he knew about Halliburton's dealings with Iraq. In a July 30,
2000, interview on ABC-TV's "This Week," he denied that Halliburton or
its subsidiaries traded with Baghdad.
-
- "I had a firm policy that we wouldn't do anything in
Iraq, even arrangements that were supposedly legal," he said. "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."
-
- Cheney modified his response in an interview on the
same program three weeks later, after he was informed that a
Halliburton spokesman had acknowledged that Dresser Rand and Ingersoll
Dresser Pump traded with Iraq. He said he was unaware that the
subsidiaries were doing business with the Iraqi regime when
Halliburton purchased Dresser Industries in September 1998.
-
- "We inherited two joint ventures with Ingersoll-Rand
that were selling some parts into Iraq," Cheney explained, "but we
divested ourselves of those interests."
-
- The divestiture, however, was not immediate. The
firms traded with Baghdad for more than a year under Cheney, signing
nearly $30 million in contracts before he sold Halliburton's 49
percent stake in Ingersoll Dresser Pump Co. in December 1999 and its
51 percent interest in Dresser Rand to Ingersoll-Rand in February
2000, according to U.N. records.
-
- Perrella said he believes Halliburton officials must
have known about the Iraqi links before they purchased Dresser. "They
obviously did due diligence," he said.
-
- And even if Cheney was not told about the business
with Baghdad before the purchase, Perrella said, the CEO almost
certainly would have learned about it after the acquisition. "Oh,
definitely, he was aware of the business," Perrella said, although
Perrella conceded that this was an assumption based on knowledge of
how the company worked, not a fact to which he could personally attest
because he never discussed the Iraqi contracts with Cheney.
-
- A long-time critic of unilateral U.S. sanctions,
which he has argued penalize American companies while failing to
punish the targeted regimes, Cheney has pushed for a review of U.S.
policy toward countries such as Iraq, Iran and Libya.
-
- In the first expression of that new thinking, the
Bush administration is campaigning in the U.N. Security Council to end
an 11-year embargo on sales of civilian goods, including oil-related
equipment, to Iraq.
-
- U.S. officials say the new policy is aimed at easing
restrictions on companies that conduct legitimate trade with Iraq,
while clamping down on weapons smuggling and other black-market
activity.
-
- If the plan is approved, there would be "nothing to
stop Iraq from importing [as many] oil spare parts as it needs" from
Halliburton and other suppliers, according to a British official who
briefed reporters on the proposal when it was introduced last
month.
-
- Cheney resigned as chairman of Halliburton last
August. Although he has retained stock options worth about $8 million,
he has arranged to donate to charity any profits from the eventual
exercise of those options, Glover Weiss said.Confidential U.N.
documents show that Halliburton's affiliates have had broad, and
sometimes controversial, dealings with the Iraqi regime.
-
- For instance, the documents detail more than $2.5
million in contracts between Ingersoll Dresser Pump Co. and Iraq that
were blocked by the Clinton administration. They included agreements
by the firm to sell $760,000 in spare parts, compressors and
firefighting equipment to refurbish an offshore oil terminal, Khor al
Amaya.
-
- The Persian Gulf terminal was badly damaged during
the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War and later was destroyed by allied warplanes
during Operation Desert Storm. At the time, Cheney was secretary of
defense.
-
- Washington halted the sale because the facility was
"not authorized under the oil-for-food deal," according to U.N.
documents. Under the terms of the oil-for-food program, Baghdad is
permitted to export crude oil, subject to U.N. supervision, through
only two terminals, Ceyhan in Turkey and Mina al Bakr on the Persian
Gulf.
-
- The equipment was never delivered to Iraq, but
Baghdad subsequently repaired the Khor al Amaya facility on its own. A
senior Iraqi oil ministry official, Faiz Shaheen, told an official
Iraqi newspaper that Iraq would soon be able to export about 600,000
barrels a day of crude oil from the terminal.
-
- Dumas said he was not aware of the dispute over the
Khor al Amaya terminal. It was unlikely, he added, that Cheney or
other top Halliburton executives would have known about the specific
deals. "We had great independence in running our business," he
said.
-
- U.S. officials say the Bush administration is
prepared to allow Iraq to resume exports from Khor al Amaya, as long
as the earnings are placed in a U.N. escrow account that is used to
pay for humanitarian supplies and further improvements to the oil
industry.
-
- "The U.S. attitude towards Iraqi exports has evolved
considerably," said James A. Placke, a Washington-based analyst for
Cambridge Energy Research Associates, a consulting firm. "They used to
tightly restrict Iraqi oil exports, and now there is no limitation on
Iraqi exports."
-
- Iraq's power to entice foreign investment,
meanwhile, has increased with the soaring demand for oil. U.S.
companies, which have been able to trade with Iraq only through
foreign subsidiaries and middlemen, are wary of dealing with Baghdad
but eager to get a piece of the action, according to industry
sources.
-
- "The American oil industry is very interested in
trying to enter Iraq," said J. Robinson West, chairman of Petroleum
Finance Co., a consulting firm. "But I think that they are quite
respectful of U.S. policy towards Saddam Hussein. There is a very
strong feeling that in fact he is the greatest threat to oil
production in the Middle East."
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- http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/sanction/iraq1/oilforfood/2001/0627chen.htm
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