March 31, 2003
Boston Globe: The Cheney Connection

by Ruben Navarrette Jr

DALLAS -- I KNOW the saying dictates that to the victor go the spoils. But there are serious questions emerging over the process by which US companies are hired to put out oil fires, build roads and bridges, restart oil production, and do whatever is necessary to ''reconstruct'' Iraq after allied forces deconstruct it. Some answers need to come from Vice President Dick Cheney, a major architect of the war with Iraq, according to many newspapers and columnists around the country. That's the same Dick Cheney who was, until 2 1/2 years ago, chief executive officer of Halliburton Co., a Houston-based oil field services firm that takes in nearly $20 billion annually.

It is a Halliburton subsidiary -- Kellogg, Brown & Root -- that landed on a short list of companies invited by the US Agency for International Development to bid on what could grow to be a $900 million contract to rebuild Iraq. That's the same Kellogg, Brown & Root that was recently awarded, by the Defense Department, the contract to put out fires at oil fields in Iraq.

Good work if you can get it. Oil-field firefighting firms fetch up to $50,000 per day, and it can take weeks to cap a single well. There's no telling how much work there will be in Iraq, but experience says there could be plenty.

In the first Gulf War, Iraqis torched more than 700 oil wells in Kuwait. About half the fires were extinguished by Halliburton.

There's that name again.

And just to prove what a small world it is, the man who was secretary of defense in 1991 was later himself awarded a choice position: CEO of Halliburton. His name: Dick Cheney.

The Halliburton gig, from 1995 to 2000, was a cash cow for Cheney. During his final 8 1/2 months on the job, he pulled down a salary of $806,332 and collected another $100,000 in benefits.

And, mind you, all this was occurring while he was directing George W. Bush's search for a running mate.

Not only did Halliburton not seem to mind that its CEO was moonlighting as a headhunter, it gave Cheney a $1.5 million bonus. But that was cookie jar money compared with what Cheney pocketed when Bush made him his running mate. Cheney then sold his stock options and pocketed another $22 million and change.

Now $22 million and change isn't just a golden handshake. It's a wet, sloppy kiss. And that brings us to the questions. Are the new contracts for Halliburton Cheney's idea of reciprocity? If not, why was the process done by invitation only and not opened to other bids? And why was all this done in relative quiet?

Moreover, why hasn't the vice president's office been more forthcoming in trying to clear up any confusion about any benefit that Halliburton might derive from having its former CEO now sitting to the right hand of the president? Why has Cheney's office typically referred inquiring reporters from The Washington Post to Halliburton, only to have Halliburton refer them back to the vice president?

And given that these are tax dollars we're talking about (lots of them), why isn't there more transparency in the whole process?

Americans may never learn the answers. After howls of protests from competing firms around the world that were aced out of the Iraqi reconstruction bidding process, the government has now shifted the responsibility for overseeing the oil-field contracts to the Army Corps of Engineers and stamped the matter ''classified.''

And why is that, exactly?

Here's the big question: Did the vice president of the United States use his influence to help make his wealthy friends at his old company wealthier?

No one knows. And it's mighty hard to find out when no one is talking and folks are giving reporters the run-around. That has to stop. Cheney should speak up and settle once and for all these questions about how his private sector experience may be affecting his public service.

Posted by Brian Stefans at March 31, 2003 07:11 PM
Comments

There has been unprecedented vocalizations from people that would otherwise rather keep the peace, i.e., allow the world, your neighborhood, to follow its circuitous path as if clockwork, predestined to perform to fruition the implicit in everyday events. The individual is compelled to put a symbolic wrench in the cogs, understandably, but the resentment, the euphoric damnation of the actions of the US government betrays something other than a proclamation for world peace. One must be rather naïve or simply misinformed to believe that a capitalist nation acts without self-interest, would be willing to divulge its actual intention and the means to achieve its ends. No individual is responsible for the unfolding events, but rather it is a compelling idea, an imperialist gamble, the equation of pure capitalism that unfolds in recent events. Supply-side economics is the ultimate American gamble, and it is being tested with a fury unbeknownst to the uninitiated. It appears as if the desires the fall of our President and his cronies, but if one can lift a newspaper to his face without flinching, the consensus of the government, our elected representatives, have voiced a majority support for the ensuing force of which we will be witness to. Clearly, it is not Bush who should be shamed, for our Congress, under the guise of support for the young men and women in our armed services, have overwhelmingly decided for you, with you, as a representative of our voice, that our country is for the preemptive regime change.

As Homo Sapien Sapiens, we have acted with brutality as a right, be us Americans, men, entitled, armed to the skull etc., but it is now in our dysphoria coupled with the millennium change that we somehow identify with a boy that has had his arms blasted off whereas a little over half a century ago we could eliminate over 10,000 of the civilian enemy in a single day and be but aggrieved and gone back to business as usual. I neither witnessed nor sanctioned firebombings, the dropping of fat man and little boy, nor have I been a supplicant to our past American foreign policy, but events have been set in motion and if we are at a loss to discover the means to stop it, one should think for a moment that there is a chance that under our scorn, we actually not only concede the right of our actions as a nation, but will again be fattened by the slaughter. Because one is against this war does not make another’s anti-American opinion laudable. It is not difficult to make a human appear as an idiot, the difficulty is in finding something of ourselves in the . The absurdity of some of the reactions to this war, the doomsayers, the juvenile, and on the surface , disobedience, the left somehow become the voice of the right, the true… The alternative is no alternative but isolation, to be able to watch our cities disassemble while we, the righteous left, condemn America yet rest unwilling to change it.

By it I mean not the but the world around you, the ghettoes that harbor violence for as long as the survivors can remember.

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